Making of a cookbook

The making of a Napa Valley cookbook

Effort to help restaurant workers led to an epic journey

JESS LANDER

I don’t think I’m alone in that for much of the past year, I felt utterly helpless. It seemed like everyone was struggling to some degree; struggling with work and finances, their health, their mental health, family and childcare, the list goes on.

While my family wasn’t unaffected, I generally felt like we were some of the luckier ones and I desperately wanted to do something, to help some people in some way. But what? Signing petitions, attending protests, making donations, and ordering takeout as often as possible just didn’t feel like enough.

Finally, an idea came last November when I saw a friend post about a cookbook published in Boulder, CO in support of the local restaurant community. We could do something like that in Napa Valley, I thought, and after some Googling, couldn’t find another collection of recipes from Napa Valley restaurants in existence (a friend

Submitted photo

Alexander Rubin Photography

The Essential Napa Valley Cookbook

Featuring 35+ recipes from Napa Valley restaurants and top chefs, The Essential Napa Valley Cookbook is available for pre-order at napavalleycookbook.com.

of mine did later send me a copy she had of one, but it was from 1986). Sure, many of our local chefs have their own cookbooks, but they don’t have their recipes published alongside dishes from their Napa neighbors.

Shortly after, I discovered another cookbook project out of New York City called “Serving New York,” which went on to raise over $200,000 for New York restaurant workers. And while Napa Valley isn’t The Big Apple, it is one of the most iconic culinary destinations in the world. Surely, people would want this book at home on their shelves — right? That’s how “The Essential Napa Valley Cookbook” was born.

FINDING A CHARITY PARTNER

Before I did anything, I needed to find a legitimate charity that could legally and efficiently handle and distribute the money we planned to raise. This was a bigger challenge than I expected, for there wasn’t an existing Napa Valley restaurant relief fund and I wasn’t about to start a non-profit on top of publishing the book.

After many emails and phone calls, a friend pointed me in the direction of Chuck Meyer, the owner of Napa Palisades Saloon and First & Franklin Marketplace. Meyer had started a group in the early days of the pandemic called Feed Napa Now. Their goal was to feed families in need during tough times, like COVID and the fires, and in turn, the restaurants also got some muchneeded business by providing these meals. Chuck loved the

Goose & Gander’s hamburger

Alexander Rubin Photography

Alexander Rubin Photography

Author Jess Lander with Bounty Hunter’s beer-can chicken.

cookbook idea and agreed to join forces. Feed Napa Now isn’t an official non-profit either, but they have a silent partner in the Girls & Boys Club Napa Valley, who agreed to help with this project too.

Seventy-five percent of the proceeds of “The Essential Napa Valley Cookbook” go directly to the restaurant workers of participating restaurants and 25 percent goes to further supporting the efforts of Feed Napa Now.

BUILDING A TEAM

While I was never big on group projects (sorry, I’m a Taurus), I knew I couldn’t do this myself and that I’d need to build a creative team that could fill the gaps around my own skill set. The two most essential pieces of this was finding a photographer and a design team. The only problem? I was asking them to volunteer their time, since I was set on donating 100 percent of the proceeds.

I immediately knew that I wanted to work with my amazing friend and mentor Kim Shaeffer, the proprietor of designthis!, a Napa-based branding and design studio that’s been around for 30 years. They do incredible work, which is now on full display in the cookbook and our website.

There are a lot of incredible photographers in Napa Valley that I know, respect, and consider friends, so this decision wasn’t as much of a no-brainer. My main goal was to find someone that was extremely passionate about our restaurant community — they had to be in order to do this out of the goodness of their own heart — and when I found out that Alexander Rubin was already partnering with restaurants to help drum up business during the pandemic, I sent him a very long email pleading my case.

In no less than three minutes I received the enthusiastic reply I was hoping for: “Yes I am so in! Keep me posted. I am all about it! Fantastic idea.”

One of my most pivotal teammates came by way of introduction from Shaeffer. Deirdre Bourdet specializes in culinary consulting and writing and helped me edit, scale, and perfect each recipe. I didn’t know it until I started it, but I was way in over my head with these recipes. I’ve learned that recipe editing is a very niche skill and if you don’t have some sort of professional culinary experience (which I don’t), there’s a lot of things that will

Jess Lander

Photographer Alexander Rubin shoots Southside Cafe’s cauliflower tacos.

literally never occur to you; I’d give examples, but I don’t want to embarrass myself. With no exaggeration whatsoever, Deirdre was a life saver.

To complete my team, I wanted a sommelier to help me select wine pairings for the book, as I didn’t think a Napa Valley cookbook would be complete without them. Desmond Echavarrie, local Master Somm and founder of Scale Wine Group, volunteered to help put together this complicated puzzle of matching a great wine with each dish.

I also called upon a few friends and marketing pros to help me promote the book to the media and recruited roughly two dozen people to assist with recipe testing (we tested every single dish, even the cocktails!). Looking back, I can’t believe that many people volunteered their valuable time and rock star skills to make this project a reality. As they say, it takes a vineyard (and it did; I drank a lot of wine throughout).

GETTING THE RECIPES

I was pre-warned about the challenges of getting recipes from chefs. I was told that they’re incredibly difficult to get in touch with, that I’d receive recipes in a myriad of formats — even hand written — that I’d often have to scale them down

Jess Lander

Photographer Alexander Rubin shooting Farmstead’s lamb shanks.

to just a few servings, and that there may be any number of missing ingredients and instructions. I love chefs, but all of this was true to some degree.

Making things even more challenging was that I had some of the worst timing ever. This idea really took off during the holiday season, which is not an ideal time of year for getting in touch with people and at the same time, we were in the midst of a second shutdown that had restaurants in a frenzy, fighting for their lives. Then a few weeks after that, restrictions started to lift and they were all scrambling to reopen and restaff.

That’s all to say that this took time and we didn’t have much of it. I wanted to launch the cookbook as quickly as possible so that we could get money to workers sooner than later, and so that we got it out there before people really moved on from the pandemic. Did I end up getting a recipe from every restaurant I reached out to? Far from it. But I did end up with 31 fantastic and iconic Napa Valley eateries that provided a total of 37 delicious recipes, so I’m calling it a success.

THE PHOTOSHOOT

I wanted a photo of every single recipe. It’s a pet peeve of mine when I land on a recipe I want to make in a cookbook and there’s no photo. I’m a very visual person.

But I knew rounding up 30 chefs wasn’t going to be easy and I didn’t want my poor volunteer photographer running from one restaurant to the next, up and down the whole valley. So, we chose two days for photoshoots and scheduled as many restaurants as we could. One day was the Napa day and Katie Hamilton Shaffer of Feast it Forward generously donated her studio for it. The next day was the Upvalley day and Chef Nash Cognetti (Pizzeria Tra Vigne) donated his St. Helena catering and event space, Tre Posti.

This was probably the most fun I had during the whole process and it went surprisingly smoothly. It was great to finally (and safely) meet everyone in person, see the dishes in real life, and yes, we got to sample a lot of them, too. I had leftovers for the whole week. Bounty Hunter even generously sent us each home with a whole beer can chicken.

There were just a handful of dishes that we shot separately in the following weeks and I’m pleased to say that every single recipe has a photo.

EVERYTHING ELSE

I joked a lot during this process that I felt like I was planning another wedding. There were so many emails to send every day, so many logistics to plan, and so, so many spreadsheets. I was also still working full time for my own business.

These are just a few of the other things I was doing during these months: reaching out to wineries to confirm wine pairings, writing the front, back, and section pages, writing the website, finding someone to write the forward (thanks Janet Trefethen), working with designthis! on book and website design, finding a printer, finding a fulfillment partner for shipping, creating a press kit, and perhaps the most difficult task, attempting to fundraise during a pandemic.

In order to donate 100 percent of the proceeds and print 5,000 copies, I had to raise a lot of money. I wanted the donations we made to be significant and actually impactful to workers, but understandably, it was very difficult receiving donations when every business out there has been hit in the last year and is working with slashed budgets. That said, we did manage to cover our costs in the end and if we sell a lot of books, we stand to donate over $100,000.

After four long months of hard work, we launched the book as a pre-release on April 21. It’s a relief to have made it to this point, but the work is not over. Now we have to actually sell this thing (that’s where you come in, reader). I’m also busy working with local retailers (holler if you’d like to carry it in your store), planning some launch parties and events for when the cookbook arrives in June, and managing all the logistics of orders and shipping.

Hopefully, things will calm down soon enough and I can actually get into my kitchen and cook up all of these fabulous recipes.