I’m so excited to share the cover of my next book, The Forest Feast Road Trip! It’s now available for pre-order and will be released March 22, 2022.
For this book, we took the idea of ‘cooking in a cabin in the woods’ on the road! In a series of family road trips over the course of about a year, we stayed in 10 different cabin-like dwellings around California. This book is a bit different in that I feature interior and exterior shots of all the cool places we stayed, from a craftsman cabin in Big Sur, to a yurt on an urban farm in LA, to an A-frame in Big Bear. The 100 vegetarian recipes are inspired by produce grown in each region and also by dishes we ate in restaurants along the way. After visiting a date farm near Palm Springs, I came up with a vegan Date Shake recipe. We picked strawberries with the gals who run Fly Girl Farm on the Central Coast which inspired a Strawberry Caprese that ended up in the book. We visited farms and wineries, dipped in natural hot springs, hiked, kayaked, swam and visited more farmers’ markets than you can imagine!
The book got delayed because of a new baby arriving mid-pandemic (I needed a bit more time!). Thankfully we did the bulk of our road tripping and shooting in 2019. That summer we did one big 2,500 mile trip spanning 3 weeks and didn’t leave the state– California is huge! A series of smaller road trips followed. I grew up in California and thought I knew it pretty well, but I discovered so many places I’d never been while making this book, and there is still so much for me to see!
Jon was really the mastermind in planning our travel days and he found so many cool hikes and other spots for us to stop at along the way. When we decided to break up a big drive heading north through the Eastern Sierras and didn’t have accommodations planned for the night in between, he went online and found a lavender farm nearby, De La Cour Ranch. They had cabins to rent and we were able to book one last minute! It ended up being one of my favorite stops, a truly magical place run by an amazing woman, Julie, who grew up less than a mile from where we live now. Unexpected discoveries and connections along the way make road tripping such a fun way to travel. Plus, this stop inspired a recipe for Lavender Shortbread Cookies!
A big shout out to all my newsletter subscribers who signed up to recipe test. Because of you, I had more testers than ever this time which makes this book feel like a community effort and a labor of love. Your names are in the back of the book. Thank you again!
I’ll share more stories soon, but in the meantime, please pre-order the book! Pre-orders actually have a lot of impact on the success of the book, so I really appreciate it. Books will ship March 2022.
xx!
Erin