Feed Your People is a community-based cookbook with recipes for crowd-pleasing, big batch cooking from warm-hearted cooks, chefs, and grandmas for the foods we gather around–from backyard barbecues and soup suppers, to hand-wrapped tamales, dumpling dinners, and seafood boils. Whether for a family reunion, a DIY wedding, holidays, memorials, non-profit fundraisers or a neighborhood block party, this book will inspire you and make cooking for your community a delicious, affordable, fun, memorable feast.
Despite the popularity of supper clubs, pop-up dinners, block parties, bake sales, and community dinners, there are very few books featuring recipes that scale for a crowd. Feed Your People will be co-authored with 18 Reasons, a beloved San Francisco based non-profit whose mission is to “empower our community with confidence and creativity to buy, cook, and eat good food every day” and published by Powerhouse Books. The next eighteen months will be a flurry of big-batch recipe testing and scaling, editing, food photography, and enlisting the best cooks we know. Although we have a great publishing partner, the production costs exceed our budget. We are excited to turn to Kickstarter—not only to help us make the book, but also to invite our community to join us for every stage of its creation.
Every recipe tells a story: To create Feed Your People, we are reaching out to our community of big-hearted cooks and chefs—experts who cook for their communities with inspiring generosity and creativity. From restaurant chefs to food entrepreneurs to legendary grandmas,Feed Your People is filled with unforgettable stories and recipes that will make your next big batch meal both mouth-watering and well-organized. A number of generous people have already come on board including Traci des Jardins, Bryant Terry, Ryan Farr, Samin Nosrat, Anya Fernald, Cortney Burns, and Sam Mogannam.
We plan to test and scale each recipe to provide detailed information on equipment and make-ahead strategies, plus timelines and tips for cooking for groups from eight to forty. The book will be a vertical hardcover (10″ x 8 3/4″), 225 pages illustrated with full-color photography. Below is a sample recipe design (the captions explain each element):
From our community to yours: Feed Your People is about building and feeding community, and, fittingly, it will tell the story of community-based food organizations who are working to feed everyone from The Cooking Project to Cooking Matters to the Farm to Table movement. We’d love for this book to inspire cooks everywhere to bring their communities together for a meal, no matter what the occasion.
In previous generations, community cookbooks traditionally symbolized the collective effort of its people: you may still have the cookbooks you made in grade school, church, or with the PTA. We are pulling our community together from across the country to make this book and to encourage people everywhere to source healthy food locally and feed each other.
How do you feed Your People? Throughout the campaign, we would love to hear your stories! Tell us how your feeder traditions and we will post it on our site.
About the Rewards:
Recipe Booklet: In order to give you a taste of the project before the book is published, we will produce a booklet of 3 to 4 recipes that will inspire you to feed your people before the book is published. (see sample spreads above).
Apron: This linen apron will let your guests know your intentions!
Recipe Testing Sessions: Each recipe testing session held in the 18 Reasons Space will be a cooking class in which we will taste the results.
Dinner at 18 Reasons: A terrific dinner in the beautiful 18 Reasons space for you and 20 of your closest friends.