Cooking in front of a camera

For twelve years, usually on Tuesdays, I followed this routine. I packed my car with food, cooking utensils, sometimes an electric skillet or grill and drove 23 miles to the KNOP TV studio north of the city of North Platte. Unlike bigger television studios with beautiful kitchen studios, I had one long fold-up table with no appliances other than what I brought myself. Luckily there was a tiny fridge and a microwave in the staff break room that I could use during my set-up. Each time I would unpack my boxes and get ready for my slot of the live half-hour pre-noon community highlights show. After the show anchor did a short news segment and then visited with another guest about a community event, it would be my turn. The show anchor joined me at my table and in 5-10 minutes, I would demonstrate a recipe that featured beef, a dairy product, or pork depending on my segment sponsor. Initially, I wondered how I could complete a recipe in that short time but soon it became old hat and I could almost do a recipe without even practicing at home first. I never had to learn to "talk to the camera" since I was always interacting with the show anchor.

How this got started will be the topic of another post. After doing the cooking spots, first once a month, then twice and finally weekly, I had lots of recipe ideas and quite a following. I would walk down the street and someone would stop me and say "aren't you the lady who cooks on TV?" It was great for my ego, if not for my pocketbook. I generally received about $40-$50 dollars each time and that had to cover ingredients, my time, and car expenses. I stuck with it because I felt a responsibility to promote dairy products since our family business was milking cows and to promote farm products in general. And who knew-Julie Childs had to start somewhere! People liked the simplicity of my recipes and the use of everyday ingredients. No one had to run to a gourmet food store to make what I demonstrated. Of course, North Platte was a little short of gourmet ingredients anyway, at least in the late 80's and 90's.

I always wanted to put my recipes together in a cookbook but I didn't have time when I was also a mother of two, a farmer's wife, and even sometimes, a school bus driver. There was also the fact that many of my recipes had come from other cookbooks. For the 1992 Hershey centennial celebration, I was the cookbook committee chairperson. We carefully checked recipes for missing ingredients and when we had too many recipes for our book, we looked at similarities between recipes that could simply be listed as variations of the same recipe to save space. The cookbook sold like wildfire and several years later was reprinted by the Hershey Educational Foundation to sell more. Needless to say, I used recipes from the cookbook for my cooking spot and shamelessly plugged the Hershey cookbook. While I could argue that many cookbooks have the same shared recipe, I just never got my cookbook done. My recipes are still sitting in folders and in computer files.

Just this week, an idea came to me. Since I'm often looking at recipes on the Internet, why not share mine here too. I always wanted my future cookbook to include not only recipes, but also extra tidbits about each recipe so blogging seems like a great way to do this. So, with all of that said, I'll start sharing recipes with my next post. I'd appreciate comments so I have some motivation to continue.