May 11, 2014

Home Style Taiwanese Cook Book

Last September I blogged that Liv and I had been in discussion with an international publisher about the prospect of making Liv‘s first cook book. Well after working out the terms of the contract, a couple time extensions and a good few sleepless nights and a lot of stress out first cook book is now complete and is being published.

Home Style Taiwanese Cooking is all about Taiwanese food and primarily food made in Taiwanese homes. The aim of this book is to show you recipes that are simple to follow with ingredients that are easy to source. The book features different categories like Meat, Poultry, Vegetarian and Sweets and there are there are a couple street food recipes in there as well.

Street food in Taiwan has it’s own cuisine so if this book sells well then who knows, maybe we’ll create a book all about street food (trust me, it’s amazingly delicious) but here we have a really colourful book that we’re really happy with.

Right now the book is being published in Singapore and Malaysia but from mid June it will be available in Europe and several months later will be available in the US. It’s basically for sale on all Amazon international sites, Waterstones, Penguin Books and Book Depository. I’ve included some links under the photos below but if you’re interested in buying this book and you’re not sure if it’s available by all means drop me an email and I ask the publisher.

Making the book was a great experience and now we’ve received copies of the book and seen it in person, although we’re biased, we think it looks great. It also feels like we’ve really achieved something in creating a book which is great after the stress of making the book. We were asked to provide 60 recipes between October and December and for my food photography I like to use mostly natural day light (although I will studio lights if absolutely necessary). During the winter here in Scotland it starts getting dark around 2.30pm and with work (myself car photography and weddings), Liv’s university and work (chef and illustrator) as well as having a 2 year old toddler, time was absolutely precious. On a few occasions we had to ask people to look after Amelia while Liv cooked and I photographed.

But here are some preview photos of the book with Liv modelling.