Nom - the book

When children leave home the thing they miss (apart from their parents, clean dishes and free hot water) is food, comfort food, Mum's food.

and when they come home whether it is for Sunday dinner or for a week they ask for certain foods to be made for them...in our house it is chicken and red sauce, macaroni cheese, chili or simply "pie" and at Christmas time they request the bonanza - stained glass cookies, stuffing, candy cane cupcakes and roast red onions.

Last year I decided I would turn my collection of handwritten recipes into a book for them, but last year passed, and this year threatened to disappear just as quickly - luckily I was able to put lots of the recipes and photos together during my downtime in Chile, so when I came home I just threw it into a Blurb template, ordered 6 copies et voila! here theyare less than a week later! I called it "Nom" because that's the word the kids have used for the past 10 years, the cover is a photo I took in Paris and it was written by "your Mum"

I had so much fun putting it together, as it will never be published I used photos from supermarket websites with abandon e.g. "this is the can the good coconut milk comes in" and pictures of cute bentos to make it more fun. The background is quad ruled, and the photos look like they have been stuck on with sticky tape, I scanned yellowing recipes out of my handwritten recipe book and included them as photos as well.

I am packaging them up with cute measuring cups, various tea towels and oven mitts for each daughter, and the most precious tea towel of all is going to my little baker Blaise.

It's a lovely linen towel, hand printed with GrannyG's scone recipe (the best scones ever!) the perfect present for the baker with everything (available on Granny's website) I know she will use it to tuck over a basket of hot scones when visiting friends, rather than for drying dishes, it's much too lovely for that!