Lori Lange - The Recipe Girl Cookbook: Dishing Out the Best Recipes for Entertaining and Every Day

Copyright 2013 by Lori Lange. All rights reserved.
Cover and interior photography copyright 2013 by Matt Armendariz
Food Styling by Adam Pearson
Prop Styling by Dani Fisher
Cover Design by Suzanne Sunwoo
Interior Design by Waterbury Publications, Inc., Des Moines, IA
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York, New York

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Lange, Lori.
The Recipe girl cookbook : dishing out the best recipes for entertaining and every day / Lori Lange ; photography by Matt Armendariz.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-118-28239-7 (pbk.); 978-0-544-18848-8 (ebk)
1. Cooking, American. I. Title.
TX715.L2773 2013
641.5973dc23

2012017213

v1.0413

Dedication

For the two most supportive and wonderful taste testers and loves of my life: my husband Brian and my son Brooks. I couldnt have done this without you .

And for my Mom, who introduced me to the joys of being in the kitchen without even realizing it .

acknowledgments

First of all, a major thank you needs to go to all of my food blog friends out there on the Internet. Without bloggers and blog readers, I wouldnt have a blog, and I thank my lucky stars on a daily basis that Ive become connected with you in such a wonderful way!

To Dee Drummond and Elise BauerI have so much respect for what youve been able to accomplish with your blogs, and I consider you both to be my greatest mentors and sources of inspiration. XOXO

Thanks to Steve Krengel of Kitchens.com for putting the idea of a Web site into my head in the first place. Your guidance and mentoring helped turn RecipeGirl.com into what it is today!

This book is a whole lot better because of the numerous friends and family who tested recipes for me and gave me honest and helpful feedback. Im so appreciative of the time you took to help a Recipe Girl out!

Big thanks to my agent Stacey Glick for seeking me out and encouraging me to take the big leap and write a cookbook, and to my editor Justin Schwartz for his brilliant guidance and patience throughout the project.

A huge thank you to the photography and styling team of Matt Armendariz, Adam Pearson and Dani Fisher for taking on the project and making my recipes look so delicious!

David Wesley, thanks for lending us your photography skills and capturing some great family photos for the book.

To my fabulous group of gourmet dinner friends in The Luz: You girls and guys have been such a fun part of my life for so many years now, and I appreciate how youve always cheered me on. It means a lot.

Thanks to Mom and my in-laws Ann and Roy for being my biggest cheerleaders from the start. Your encouragement and love mean the world to me.

Sister Susieyou have always been there for me. Thank you for letting me bounce recipe ideas off of you and for always listening to my crazy food blog rambling. I love that were sisters who are best friends too.

Brother BruceI wish you lived closer so you could sample my creations. Be sure to bookmark what I know will be your favorite Moms Tacos and make them often for your family. Love you!

And finally, I couldnt have written this book without the love and support of my husband Brian and my Recipe Boy Brooks. You are the loves of my life, and you are the reason I want to be in the kitchen.

the story of recipe girl

Id love to be able to divulge a glamorous, Hollywood-like romantic story of how I became Recipe Girl. Im afraid I dont have anything like that to dish out. Instead, Ill share the story of how a girl like me discovered passion and joy in the kitchen, and how I turned that into a career that I so dearly love.

I suppose it all began with my mother. She made the basics for us kids back in the 70stacos, spaghetti and boxed spice cake. We didnt go out to eat a whole lot, so I had the experience of watching Mom in the kitchen doing her thing. Every Christmas we baked our traditional batches of cookies together, and by high school I assisted with getting roasts and Sloppy Joes ready for dinner before Mom got home from work. Even then, I was obsessed with a tidy kitchen, stacking dishes neatly, organizing the plastic bowls and alphabetizing spices. In college I cooked pasta with roommates and baked chocolate chip cookies for boyfriends. I started to amass a ridiculously large collection of recipes from magazines and cookbooks, always testing out those new recipes on friends and family. Grad-school catering work really got me interested in entertaining and in styling the food to make it look beautiful. I married Brian (the man of my dreams), and together we traveled, enjoyed discovering new foods, hosted parties and had a baby.

I love spending time in the kitchen with my son Brooks.

In my professional life, I was an elementary school teacher and taught the little ones for 12 years before I made the decision to stay home with our son, Brooks. At home I continued to collect recipes and cook for my family. I started a Gourmet Dinner Club in our neighborhood, sharing my love for cooking and entertaining with like-minded friends. People began calling me for recipes and asking for advice on what to serve for various occasions, and neighborhood kids seemed to find their way into my kitchen to see what Mrs. Lange was cooking on any given day. A dear friend of ours with an Internet business of his own weighed in with a recommendation that I start a website to share my passion. I listened to that wonderful friend, and RecipeGirl.com was up and running by mid-2006. It was a place for me to share recipes and menus for entertaining, and I eventually added a food blog, too. I taught myself the basics of html and food photography, and included big (eventually), beautiful photos of the recipes I shared online. Companies started contacting me and asking me to create recipes for their brands. The online food community and home cooks all over the world began visiting RecipeGirl.com, and its following and readership has been steadily increasing ever since. With roughly 2 million page views a month currently, readers now come to RecipeGirl.com to browse over 2,600 recipes for dinner ideas, sweet treats, holiday inspiration and themed party menus.

And what do I get out of this? I get to live my dream every day absorbed in the world of food and recipes and communicating with home cooks and food professionals via email, blog comments and social media. Writing a cookbook just seemed like the next step in this lifelong love for what I do!