Mindful Cooking Olivia Heins Thesis 2019—2020 Process Book
1
Con tents
Concept
4
Research
10
Design Process
20
Final
32
3
Con cept
Young adults living in and around New Paltz have ample opportunities to eat healthily and sustainably, yet those who are first entering the world of cooking may not be fully aware of these options. Mindful Cooking aims to educate these first-timers on sustainable and healthy food options, helping them find locally grown produce in and around New Paltz, and encouraging them to incorporate healthy recipes into their everyday lives. Mindful cooking is a cookbook including easy-to-follow recipes, original illustrations of these recipes, a guide on how to make grocery shopping simple and easy, and important information on local farms and farmers’ markets in and around New Paltz. I became interested in this topic when I first started to live on my own and learn to cook for myself a couple of years ago. It was hard to separate what foods were truly healthy, in the sense that they were fulfilling the needs of my body and my environment, and what foods were just marketing to be healthy. I grew up cooking with my mom, which is where I learned most of these recipes, but it was still a struggle learning how to find the best ingredients, shopping for myself, and trying not to waste the food I would buy. It became easy to look past the idea that what I was consuming every day was affecting not only my body but my environment. Living in New Paltz has really taught me how to connect with my food sources. Being able to buy produce from local farms and see exactly where my food was coming from made me appreciate it so much more and truly understand the importance of sustainable and healthy cooking. This mindset took time to fully understand, and I really wanted to provide the right tools so that these concepts would easily fit into someone’s everyday life. The goal of Mindful Cooking is to make cooking healthy and sustainably attainable for its audience. Once we learn how to cook some simple recipes, how to easily stock our pantries, and how to find locally grown produce cooking with the health of our bodies and environments becomes innate. Including a sophisticated color palette and fun illustrations would help the audience connect with this book.
5
Concept
I started off this project thinking questioning why people have different diets and how food affects everyone’s bodies differently. At first, I thought I wanted to create a book and an app for this project. I quickly realized that would be too much work to take on and chose to stick with the book idea. I had a lot of ideas floating around when I first started, some being a guide book about different diets, a cooking challenge to get the reader involved with the cooking process, a map of New Paltz farms, and a cookbook with healthy and sustainable recipes. After interviewing friends and experts I realized that what people struggled with the most was learning how to cook and eat healthy. It took me a while to narrow down the content of this book because my topic was so broad at first, but in the end, I made a cookbook/guidebook to cooking healthily and sustainably.
7
Concept
A more accurate representation of the final concept of this project. The idea is to give the audience a sort of guide book on how to start to cook and eat healthily and sustainably. Through the sharing of recipes, tips on local farms in and around New Paltz, and how to effectively grocery shop the reader will learn how to cook for themselves while being mindful about their food sources and what best for their bodies.
9
Rese arch
I spent a lot of time researching during the process of making Mindful Cooking, the research I did made up the contents of this book. My first steps to researching were interviewing my friends as well as experts such as cookbook author Nava Atlas and dietitian Mary Murphy. After I narrowed down the main concept of my project I then relied heavily on web resources as well as other cookbooks to inspire the contents of this book. I researched local farm’s websites in order to collect information like where they are located and what their goal is. I also collected content from the cookbook Good and Cheap by Leanne Brown which I included in Mindful Cooking.
11
Research
I invited my friends to my apartment for my thesis party. I made them dinner in hopes that this would get them excited to come over and chat about my thesis. Overall the experience was great, we shared good food and good conversation. I chose to invite my friends because my target audience is young adults living on their own for the first time, and they all fit this description. I found out that most of them were very interested in cook healthy and sustainably but did not know how to go about it.
13
Research
I interviewed the school dietitian Mary Murphy. Mary was very welcoming and gave me a lot of information on mindful eating that I used in my project. She informed me that a large amount of the students she worked with are interested in sustainable and healthy ways of eating and that she takes a “non-diet� approach to nutrition. Hearing this from a professional validating my opinion on the topic, I agreed that dieting is associated with a failure to maintain weight loss and that a healthy way of eating should be a lifestyle. Mary gave me a lot of book suggestions, including Good and Cheap, that I used to collect my content.
15
Research
I went to Nava Atlas’s talk at the Elting library in town. Nava talked about her new cookbook “5-ingredient Vegan” which as she explained, is an easy way for working or busy people to live a vegan lifestyle. Nava explained that being vegan means more to her than just eating healthy, eating a vegan diet is a way for humans to help the planet and climate crisis. She stated that if you truly cared about the planet that you would be or become vegan. Nava also explained that her recipes are essentially “too easy” she said, “if any of these recipes takes you more than 10 minutes you are moving at a glacial pace.” I liked how she explained this in a very direct and easy way, going to this talk really inspired me to continue to research how to help my audience.
17
Research
I used information from local farm’s websites, the USDA website, and the book Good and Cheap for most of my content. I took information about seasonal produce, when the farm’s are open, and how the farm started from local farm’s websites. I used the USDA website to find information about produce like when they are in season and what nutritional values they hold. I cited quotes and information about grocery shopping from the book Good and Cheap.
19
Design Process
The design making process was definitely a long and somewhat difficult one for me. It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to present my information, specifically the recipes. Doing in-class critiques and getting feedback on my thesis blog is what really helped me to find my design solution, as well as making many iterations. Making the illustrations was a fun process, although I had to redo some illustrations the end product was worth it. In the final book design I used two fonts, I used Scriptorama for the titles and Gould Old Style for the body text.
21
Design Process
I got most of my design inspiration from looking at other cookbook designers. Mood boards became a part of my design process because they helped me visualize the styles that I wanted to create. Making these mood boards helped me find the colorful and sophisticated style that I portrayed in Mindful cooking. Cipe Pineles’ cookbook Leave Me Alone With the Recipes was a big inspiration for my project, I was inspired by her use of color and line work and used these techniques in my illustrations.
23
Tomato and Spinach Omelette
Directions: Dice tomatoes into small pieces.
Ingredients:
Add oil to a skillet and heat up on medium heat for one minute.
Âź cup of Tomato diced (can be any type of tomatoes you have)
Add tomatoes and garlic to the skillet and cook for 2-3 minutes or until garlic starts to brown.
1 cup of baby spinach 1 clove of garlic chopped 2 eggs (preferably organic) 1 tsp. Olive oil (can also use coconut oil or avocado oil also) Salt and pepper to taste 1 slice whole wheat/grain bread
Add spinach to the skillet and cook down until wilted. Crack eggs into a separate bowl and whisk with a fork until foamy, add salt and pepper and mix in. Add eggs to the pan and turn heat to medium-low, mix eggs with a spatula while they are cooking. Cook for a few minutes until eggs are cook through if the eggs are not cooking all the way through put a lid on the pan for a few minutes. Flip the omelet over and put it on a plate.
Design Process
Serve with a toasted piece of bread.
Throughout Thesis I I focused mainly on researching and getting all of my content in order. By the end of Thesis I I had all of the recipes and content written out but I had not yet established a visual language for my book. For the end of the semester critique I had started to design what a spread of my book would look like and successfully finished two illustrations. Luckily the illustrations stuck! but the book spread design did not. This critique helped me realize that I really needed to focus on what type I wanted to use and how I would want to lay the recipes out.
When are these foods in season?
Tomatoes - late July to mid September Spinach - mid July to October
Where to buy them locally?
Tantillo’s Farm Market in Gardiner, NY
Fun Fact:
Broccoli and Olive Oil are both s uperfoods!
Thesis I Final Critique
25
Design Process
By the midpoint of Thesis II I had done about half of my food illustrations and had been trying to figure out how to lay out the recipes. I was struggling with what typefaces to use and how to separate the information on the page. After having the midpoint critique I realized that Is till had a lot of work to do. My goal was to figure out what typeface to use for the titles because the ones I had tried weren’t working out. I also needed to make the other half of my illustrations and fix up most of the ones I had done.
27
Design Process
Illustration was a big part of this project. Learning the best technique and the style that I liked best took some time but it was time well spent. I used a combination watercolor and illustration markers to achieve this abstract and fun style. I edited all of my illustrations in photoshop in order to brighten them and make the image sharper.
29
Design Process
By this point I had all my illustrations done and I had a set visual language. I established my typefaces and the colors I would be using, but I was still struggling with which layout was most readable and cohesive. I liked how the text looked on the colored background but I knew that it was not the best decision because it would be a little hard to read. Through the process making and remaking my layout design, I came to the decision to use a colored background for the page with the illustrations and leave the background on the text side blank.
31
Fi nal
Through making this book I have learned a lot about who I am as a designer. I learned that I always need more time to work on something than I think and that I only feel satisfied with a solution if I have tried every option. I remade the recipe spreads countless amounts of times looking for the perfect solution, and this was a frustrating and time-consuming task. Although it was frustrating, this way of working works best for me because I am able to reassure myself that the previous design solutions I have tried are not as good as the final one. I tend to work like this because I am not always confident in my work, and it takes me a while to believe that what I made is important and successful. I see the flaws in this style of working and this is something I will continue to work on from here on out. I think that I could have used my time more effectively and included content like a cooking challenge or information on how important it is to cook for yourself. Despite some lost content, this book still holds value and can be useful to any young adult struggling to cook for themselves. I think that the illustrations and design of this book worked very well together. I particularly loved making the illustrations and will continue to use this style of illustration forever. I have thoroughly enjoyed working on this project for the past year, it is so rewarding to know that all my hard work is appreciated and seen by many. Although this semester did not end how we all expected it taught me so much and pushed me even harder to create something that would make an impact. I really appreciate everyone who helped me create Mindful Cooking and everyone who took the time or who will take the time to read it.
33
Final
35