It's been a busy month. The holidays kept coming and there wasn't much time to work on the book. Holiday season starts a couple of weeks before Rosh Hashana and (this year) ended with Canadian Thanksgiving on Monday. Each weekend was another holiday and it kept us hopping at the store.
Between holidays, I managed to squeak out enough time to finish testing all of the recipes. I even put everything together in a (really large) Word file. So we've moved on to the next step. Right now I have a couple of family members reading through the book doing a basic edit -- the first of many. I'm spending my time working on some formatting and photos.
I'm trying to work out what to do with the formatting. When my first book was published I sent in the manuscript for the first round of edits and got a note back that all of the weight measurements needed to be converted to volumes. It's not uncommon for North American publishers to say no to weights and insist on volumes -- in fact, there's a great discussion topic on this subject over at the eG Forums (click). You'll see that many of the posts on this topic are strongly pro weight measurements.
Some of the arguments publishers give for going with volume are that most home cooks don't have scales in their kitchens and that the North American public doesn't want weights. I'd say the truth about what the public wants lies somewhere in the middle. Many cooks like to use weights because the results are more consistent. Many home cooks use volume. So I'm trying to include both.
The next question is metric vs. Imperial measurements. I plan on including both. The question is how do you include all of that information in a way that's still easy to read and understand? It's a lot of numbers to include for each ingredient and I'm trying to figure out the best way to present it.
Do you have a preference?
