What I am learning ...

Dolly (Watts) McRae's many businesses

2011-11-01T19:25:00.000-07:00

Take a look at a slide show of Dolly's many businesses. Just Like Grandma's Bannock, Liliget Feast House and Where People Feast, An Indigenous People's Cookbook

It is seen on YouTube.

See the Where People Feast website.

Couponing

2011-10-26T20:56:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Extreme Couponing on TLC I started to cruise the internet for printable coupons. I am now on the couponsforcanada.ca website and found quite a few coupons for free stuff.

There weren't very many coupons on the websaver.ca website, but some free stuff too. I am not sure why some websites only offer less than 10 coupons.

To recieve free samples or coupons you may have to leave the website and go to the company website to register by entering your name and email address and sometimes your mailing address. On the smartsource.ca web you have to install a program on your computer to print out the coupons - might no be a good idea.

On the safeway.ca website you can enter your postal code or City and Province to see their weekly specials. You can pick out the items on sale that earn extra air miles. You can add thing to you grocery list and print it out.

You will have to check out the expiry date, you may sign up just to find out the offer has expired. Some free offers are given with a certain dollar amount of purchase.

Local combines passion of cooking and writing

2011-08-05T16:44:00.000-07:00

Check out this write up in the alberni valley times about Annie Laurie Watts.

Local combines passion of cooking and writing

Author offers healthy choice

2011-07-29T19:19:00.000-07:00

Author offers healthy choice

Check out a write up in the Alberni Valley Times by Siobhan Burns.

2011-07-29T04:06:00.001-07:00

Anna & Kristine

Thank you Anna & Kristine for testing the recipes from our cookbook because our publishers updated our cookbook for future printings. These were changes that mom and I requested before the first printing and they were not done.

Just Like Grandma's Bannock recipe, when Ben Genaille was talking about the yeast not being allowed to sit and get frothy before adding it to the flour. We have been making this recipe for over 40 years and made over a million bannock and never once let the yeast sit and get frothy. When the recipe says to put the dough in a covered bowl to let raise, we usually put a plastic cover to seal completely to let raise. The dough gets hollow in the middle when the bannock is not turned enough. One correction was made to the recipe, 6 cups of flour and 1 extra cup to add slowly if the dough was to moist.

As for the wedding cake, we had to reduce the size of the Gitsegukla Wedding Cake to make 10 servings instead of the usual 300 servings as you would for a wedding. In the recipe it says to soak the raisins and dried cranberries in boiling water. The recipe is changed, to use the boiling water in the dough mix.

The cooks added hot mustard to the Buffalo Hominy Corn Chowder and the kept it on high heat when it said to simmer.

The pine needles were to be fully dried and ground. If you keep it in a sealed container before it is fully dried, it will get moldy.

Newletters

2011-07-21T18:27:00.001-07:00

Poll

2011-07-21T18:16:00.001-07:00

beHealthy Cookbook Press Release

2011-05-19T01:25:00.001-07:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Annie Watts
Company: ALW Publishing
Telephone: 778-421-4665
Email: annielwatts@shaw.ca
Website: www.behealthycookbook.com

New Cookbook Release That Offers Nutritionally Balanced Menu Plans and Healthy Recipes to Increase Energy

Port Alberni, British Columbia, May 18, 2011 - ALW Publishing today announced release of "beHealthy Cookbook" that provides 14 menu plans and over 100 healthy recipes. The recipes are prepared with the minimum of fuss and are designed for those who desire a healthy and active lifestyle.

"We are excited about Annie’s new cookbook that focuses on whole foods. Annie has creatively provided us with a cookbook that looks at eating and cooking whole foods that awakens our bodies and our relationship to food." Fiona Devereaux, RD, Community Nutritionist for Aboriginal Health, Royal Jubilee Hospital. Erin Audrey Rowsell, Food Security Dietitian, Aboriginal Health, Vancouver Island Health Authority.

The menu plans present a way to keep your body nourished with all the correct proportions of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals to build your natural defenses against chronic diseases. The recipes are free of dairy, gluten, red meat, starch, yeast, citrus and table salt. The focus is on creating simple, appetizing dishes that saves time in the kitchen by using few ingredients that can be easily found in supermarkets or stores that specialize in nutrient rich ingredients that are essential for a healthy diet, for example, soy beans and quinoa.

Despite the relative simplicity of these dishes, they are still elegant enough to be served at dinner parties, especially the Crab Croquettes with Spicy Salsa, Grilled Chicken & Veggie Kebabs and Wasabi Crusted Salmon. Watts' vegetable dishes are appealing and varied, including Salad with Raspberry Dressing, Cucumber and Dill Salad and Vegetable Rolls & Peanut Sauce. Watts´ desserts are equally appetizing, with Pumpkin Creme Brulees, Wild Berry Double Cream Crepes and Apricot Oat Cookies. Watts shows that delicious food can be prepared with a minimum of fuss, even with guests on the way.

Slow down, enjoy your food, live healthier, achieve your ideal weight and take this gastronomic journey. You can purchase this new "beHealthy Cookbook" right from their new website at www.behealthycookbook.com for $20.00 Canadian, volume discounts are offered. For further information, contact Annie Watts, ALW Publishing, by telephone 778-421-4665 or by email annielwatts@shaw.ca

Before finishing secondary school, Annie worked as a waitress and became interested in becoming a chef. In 1979, she received a Culinary Arts Degree at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Years later, Annie became interested in obtaining a degree in Computer Science. Annie and her mother, Dolly (Watts) McRae, co-authored a cookbook that was published April 2007 entitled "Where People Feast, An Indigenous People´s Cookbook". Where People Feast celebrates their twelve years spent running their restaurant, Liliget Feast House and Catering, located near English Bay in downtown Vancouver, BC, Canada. Since closing the restaurant in 2006 Annie and her mother were both very busy promoting their cookbook. In 2007, Gourmand Awards honored Where People Feast with the title, Best Local Cuisine Cookbook in Canada. Recognized as the "Oscars" of the food and wine cookbook industry, the Gourmand Awards help booksellers and buyers identify the best out of the 24,000 food and wine books published every year. Annie began authoring her second cookbook beHealthy Cookbook in 2008 in response to the nutritional needs of herself and her family who have food allergies.

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2011-05-09T04:17:00.001-07:00

beHealthy Cookbook

2011-05-09T03:51:00.000-07:00

To live a long healthy life you need to follow a nutritionally balanced diet, get adequate amounts of sleep and be physically active. It takes discipline and time to reach your healthy weight. The energy and self confidence that you will gain can make a difference to those around you who struggle to attain their healthy weight. The “beHealthy Cookbook” offers 14 reduced calorie menu plans of 1680 calories each and over 100 recipes that are free of dairy, gluten, red meat, starch, yeast, citrus and table salt.

“We are excited about Annie’s new cookbook that focuses on whole foods. Annie has creatively provided us with a cookbook that looks at eating and cooking whole foods that awakens our bodies and our relationship to food.” Fiona Devereaux, RD, Community Nutritionist for Aboriginal Health, Royal Jubilee Hospital. Erin Audrey Rowsell, Food Security Dietitian, Aboriginal Health, Vancouver Island Health Authority.

Anna and Kristina's Grocery Bag: Season 1 Episode 51 | LocateTV

2011-01-12T17:06:00.000-08:00

Anna and Kristina's Grocery Bag: Season 1 Episode 51 | LocateTV

Hi,

Anna & Kristina's Grocery Bag channel 20 8:30 pm tonight will be cooking recipes from our cookbook Where People Feast

The show has been picked up by Oprah's new network, OWN. Which means it should be broadcast in the US nationally soon!!

Notes about show:

Anna & Kristina's Grocery Bag
W Network
Channel 20
8:30 pm January 12, 2011

They cooked recipes from our cookbook Where People Feast.

First off, they picked a couple of recipes that mom and I had sent changes to the recipes to our publisher and they were not updated and printed with the wrong instructions.

Second Anna and Kristina made a few mistakes.

First, Just Like Grandma’s Bannock recipe, when they were talking about the yeast not being allowed to sit and get frothy before adding it to the flour. We have been making this recipe for over 40 years and made over a million bannock and never once let the yeast sit and get frothy. Second, the recipe says to put the dough in a covered bowl to let raise, but the cooks only put a clothe over the bowl. Third, the dough gets hollow in the middle when the bannock is not turned enough as the recipe says to.

We wrote to the publishers before the cookbook was printed and told them to put 6 cups of flour and 1 extra cup to add slowly if the dough was to moist.

As for the wedding cake, we had to reduce the size of the Gitsegukla Wedding Cake to make 10 servings instead of the usual 300 servings as you would for a wedding.

In the recipe it says to soak the raisins and dried cranberries in boiling water. The recipe is supposed to use the water in the dough mix (page 145) – another change that we requested that was not made before it was printed.

The cooks added hot mustard to the Buffalo Hominy Corn Chowder and the kept it on high heat when it said to simmer (page 104). Simmer not boil for 30 minutes.

The cooks over cooked the herring roe and didn’t soak it to get the salt off the herring roe before cooking (page 63)

What a disaster.

If only they asked us to be on their program we could have explained these things as they were preparing our dishes.

Annie Watts

Native Recipes in Gourmand Award Winning Cookbook Now in Second Printing

2010-10-19T18:36:00.000-07:00

Native Recipes in Gourmand Award Winning Cookbook Now in Second Printing

Raw Diet Menu

2010-01-02T12:47:00.000-08:00

I am working on a raw diet menu and almost have it done. I reworked it for about 2 months now. The first one had all nuts, vegetables and fruits. Then I added a couple of sprouted nut and sprouted brown rice recipes. I find it hard to find something that uses grains that have enough potassium or vitamin D. Does anyone have any ideas, any recipes? I was thinking of having 2 cups of fortified soy beverage to get enough vitamin D in the daily menu.

Healthy Eating Cookbook with Daily Menus

2010-01-01T15:12:00.000-08:00

With a little planning, healthier eating is never impossible. The current diet of many North Americans includes many convenience foods. Convenience foods unfortunately may be filled with refined and processed food, additives and preservatives that rob whole foods of their nutrients.

When I was working on my dessert recipes, I didn’t realize how much sugar it took to make them sweet. The carbohydrates and calories were remarkably reduced just by reducing the amount of sugar used in the recipes. I used natural sweeteners as much as possible in the recipes, such as fruit, grains and vegetables. If need be, use molasses, honey or reduced apple juice to sweeten your recipes.

I am working on a healthy eating cookbook. The recipes are free of dairy, gluten, yeast, citrus and red meat. In my healthy recipes I have lowered the level of fat, sugar, salt and the decreased the portions sizes all things that will help in keeping you at your optimum healthy weight.

With the rising risks to our health, for example, diabetes, heart disease and obesity, it only makes sense to live a healthier lifestyle. The recipes include commonly accessible food such as local organically grown produce and nutrient rich foods that may not be produced locally, but are an excellent addition to a healthy diet, for example, soy bean products. The menus in this cookbook help you keep your body nourished with all the correct proportions of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals.

Goal: Lose weight and stay healthy

2009-12-31T15:50:00.000-08:00

When I used to think about losing weight, I used to think of eating lots of celery, carrots, drinking lots of water and working out in a gym everyday. While all of this is a good part of a healthy diet, veggies, water and exercise, you need a better plan. You need all your nutrients everyday. If you ever walked around a quarter mile track 12 times, you will have felt your your fat melting off your body and your muscles getting firmer. My new years resolution is to walk around the track until I reach my ideal weight of 145 pounds. I was 125 pounds until I was 25 years old. Then the bad eating habits and lack of exercise caught up with me.

Last year, I started to do research on a healthy way to lose weight and maintain my ideal healthy weight. I had to design menus and recipes that addressed a few food allergies that my and others in my family have, like allergies to dairy, gluten, citrus, yeast and red meat. I have 14 reduced calorie menus of 1680 calories each, including a heart healthy, raw food, vegan, spirit lifter, healthy eyes menu, just to name a few. There are 7 maintenance menus of 2000 calories each and 7 post activity snack menus of 300 calories each. The "Healthy Eating Cookbook with daily menus" is completely finish - a year later. That may not be the name of the book - it's up to the editor/publisher - whoever that may be.

I followed my calorie reduced menus for 19 days without exercise and lost a pound a day. I lost 19 pounds. I can't wait for the new year to get started on my journey of weight lose.

Finding a publisher

2009-12-29T09:33:00.000-08:00

Mom was approached by Douglas & McIntyre about 2004 to publish a cookbook. The editor had all the restaurant recipes and photos. She got ill and after a long absence from work, she had to returned the recipes and photos. Arsenal Pulp Press became interested in publishing the cookbook near the end of 2005. We signed the contract with them and I started editing the recipes. Most of the recipes had different serving sizes. Some were for 100 people, because that is double the seats we had in the restaurant, two seatings a night. Some were for 300 people, the average number of people we served for our catering jobs. I had to reduce the recipes to 6 or 8 servings. There were no cooking temperatures, and if there happened to be temperatures, it was for our industrial gas stove and oven, very different from home ovens and stoves. The size of the cans were marked into the recipes instead of the actual volume of the contents of the can. Needless to say there was a lot of work to be done on the cookbook. Some of the sections needed more recipes. After that was all done I sent the recipes into the editor. She then asked if I would put a story with every recipe and an illustration for every chapter. The last thing I needed to do was write the introduction to the cookbook.

After the "Where People Feast, An Indigenous People's Cookbook" was published in April 2007, I had a lot of recipes left over so I got together a proposal for a second cookbook, a feasting cookbook, one with feasting stories in it. My agent sent it to a few publishers and they replied that there was not a market for a second indigenous cookbook from the same area. So I started on a dessert recipe cookbook. Wrote a proposal and my agent sent it out, but there are too many dessert cookbooks to compete with. No luck in getting these two cookbooks published.

There are a lot of rejections, but along the way, I am learning about what the readers want. Even though the publishers don't want to publish the cookbooks. I can always make them into ebooks and sell them on the ebook stores. So all the time and research that I took to develop all these recipes won't be wasted.

Julie/Julia Project, the movie

2009-12-28T21:43:00.000-08:00

What an awesome movie. Just finished watching it for the fifth time.

In 1979 I went to Culinary Art School at Malaspina College in Nanaimo, BC. It was 12 months of learning everything from breakfasts, lunch and dinner to desserts. We dressed in white pants, white chefs jacket and tall chefs hat and we cooked everyday for the college students. It was fun and frustrating at times. I loved learning to make souffles and creme caramels. We spent from 2 weeks to a few months in each section of the kitchen. We learned to butcher a pig and cow. We learned how to make all kinds of sauces. One of the important lessons was to quickly chopped the vegetables without chopping off our fingers.

I worked in all kind of restaurant kitchens after I got my certificate. But became interested in computer programming and started working towards my degree.

Recently I worked with my mom in a restaurant that she owned in downtown Vancouver, called the Liliget Feast House and Catering. She owned it for 12 years. It was a first nations fine dining restaurant. I absolutely loved working there. We had visitors from all over the world that returned faithfully every year.

Gathering recipes

2009-12-28T21:10:00.000-08:00

When I was gathering information for my cookbook. I had to consult with the chefs that we hired about the recipes. They sometimes helped me try the new recipes out. I also looked through about 500 cookbooks and magazines to get ideas for the recipes that I needed to make. I had to have at least 10 recipes per section. Both the indigenous and the health cookbooks were hard to come up with appropriate recipes. For the indigenous cookbook, the ingredients had to be something that me or my mom would have grown up eating. Each recipe had to have a story with it. As for the health cookbook all the recipes had to fit into the daily meal plans. They couldn't have too much carbohydrates, or too little nutritional value. I had to do a lot of research on all the ingredients. I looked on the Health Canada website for all the nutritional values and put them all into a database so that I could divide, for example, the protien out so that there would be an even amount for each meal and snack.

ebooks

2009-12-21T22:59:00.000-08:00

These are some of the things that I learned about getting an ebook published. My publisher had created one for my previously published cookbook entitled "Where People Feast, An Indigenous People's Cookbook". It is available for purchase online to use with the Sony Reader. The publisher is also looking into making an ebook available on Amazon to use with their reader Kindle. I would love to program an application for use on the iPhone, but my publisher said that they are looking into it.

With Amazon's Kindle you have to be a resident of the United States and have a US bank account in order to collect royalties from Amazon. The Kindle reader is only sold in the US. You can however get the Kindle application for PC and iPhone and order the ebooks from Canada. Sony Reader is sold in the Canada and the US. The best programming language to use for Amazon ebooks is HTML compressed to zip files. The images should be 64 kb or smaller and no larger than 450 x 550 pixels.

Here are a few places to get information about developing and distributing ebooks:

http://books.google.com/
http://www.aprillhamilton.com/resources/HowToUseAmazonDTP_v2.pdf
http://ebookapp.com/ and http://developer.apple.com/
http://touchbooksreader.com/
http://www.smashwords.com/
http://www.wordclay.com/
http://www.booklocker.com/
http://mobipocket.com/eBookBase/en/homepage/pub_info.asp
http://www.mininova.org/