The S&L Cookbook is Here!

The Salt & Lavender cookbook

Salt & Lavender: Everyday Essentials is a collection of 100+ recipes that include many of the blog’s most popular recipes as well as some of my personal favorites. The goal was to provide you, our loyal readers, with a beautiful physical book that you can enjoy in your kitchens for years to come. There’s a well-rounded mix of everything from pastas, soups, skillet recipes, appetizers, salads, sandwiches, and sides, and it includes chicken/turkey, beef, pork, fish/seafood, and meatless meals. It has plenty of the comfort foods you’ve come to love from S&L as well as some lighter options and freezer and pantry recipes.

Read on if you’re interested in some behind-the-scenes tidbits on how we ended up writing a cookbook!

The background

For years now, readers have asked if Salt & Lavender has a cookbook for sale, and the answer was always “No”. Writing a cookbook is a huge undertaking, and my focus was always on growing the blog as food blogging is a very competitive industry. My friend Stephanie, who runs the popular food blog The Cozy Cook, published her cookbook a couple of years ago, and after learning about how she did it, that is what finally convinced me to go for it!

The process

After much discussion with my family, my sister (who also works at S&L — check out our newly updates bios) and I decided to team up and write a book!

There are two main ways you can publish a book: traditional publishing and self-publishing. Self-publishing gives you more control of the final product as well as the deadlines, and that is the route we decided to take, just like Stephanie did with her book. Because we wanted to include existing blog recipes and I did not want to take two years off the website to develop brand new recipes solely for a cookbook, it was the obvious choice. We worked with the wonderful Weller Smith Design, a boutique design company that supports small businesses through the entire end-to-end process of self-publishing from start to finish.

We signed on to write the book in April 2023. We were eager to get things going, and we produced the first draft of the manuscript that June. And then the editing began.

Since the book comprises existing blog recipes, I got to work on taking new photographs for recipes where needed. Some of the recipes have been on the website for many years and needed updating since my photography skills have improved since then, and some were missing photos on my laptop that I could export in a high enough quality format for printing. It was months of work! I also photographed the other fun little elements in the book that hopefully you will love. 🙂

Bit by bit, with biweekly Zoom meetings with WSD keeping us on track and organized, many late nights, and some tears shed, we started to see the book come together. We submitted the final manuscript including all photographs after several rounds of editing in November 2023. It was a huge relief, but a different type of work would soon begin! In January 2024, we started receiving sample pages from the printer including the cover (!!), began building the Shopify store and the dedicated cookbook page on the website, started to really think about logistics with warehousing and sending out advance copies to friends/family/bloggers, accounting, how the presale would work, how we’d promote the book, etc. So many things go into writing and selling a book, especially when you decide to self-publish.

We received the first copies of the book in February, and it was kind of surreal! The bulk of the shipment of the books will arrive in the warehouse April 25, so readers can look forward to their own copy arriving shortly after that.

The cover

I am very happy with the book’s cover — it was something that I was nervous about, but I am thrilled with how it turned out. When we first started working on the book, what the cover would look like was always in the back of my mind. For months, I was going back and forth thinking about putting creamy garlic chicken, lemon chicken orzo soup, or even a photo of myself or a collage of photos on the cover. Once we decided on creamy garlic chicken (one of the first recipes to go “viral” on the blog and set the tone for the type of recipes Salt & Lavender would specialize in), I had some decisions to make.

The existing photos of the recipe were all cropped too much and therefore unusable, I thought, so I decided to do a new photo shoot for the cover. I was extremely nervous knowing that one of those photos would be immortalized in that way. I fussed over the styling of the food and the photos did not turn out like I had hoped, so I was discouraged. In one of our many Zoom meetings Leanna and Erin at WSD listened to my concerns, and in real time Leanna mocked up a cover using a photo that I had taken a few years ago for that recipe which I loved but had discounted as an option. I love the way she cropped and arranged the photo to make it work! Who knew that when I took that photo back on March 25, 2021, it would end up on the cover of a cookbook that I had no plans to write? Not me!

It’s finally here.

I hope you enjoyed reading a bit about how the Salt & Lavender cookbook came to be. It has been encouraging and humbling seeing your excitement when we have shared sneak peeks of the book on social media!

Thanks a million for your support, and I can’t wait until you receive your copy of the book!