The Book Has Been Released! | Freshman in the Kitchen

The Book Has Been Released! September 3, 2008

Posted by Max in : Updates , trackback

So we finally recovered from the excitement of the book release weekend for Freshman in the Kitchen and it could not possibly have gone any better. Here’s a small recap of the weekend.

Friday - Eli arrived in Michigan at about 5.30am, Max drove down from Ann Arbor (a few hours later) and we headed down to WDET 101.9 to do our interview with Craig from Detroit Today. Eli had never been on the radio before and had no idea what to expect, while Max was a seasoned vet from WBCN’s 3am slot. It turned out pretty well and we were happy to get on such a prominent show and radio station for 15 minutes. We spent the rest of the day prepping food for our first book signing to take place the next morning in Lexington Michigan. We both were very responsible and were in bed by 3am.

Saturday - We were on the road by about 8.30am heading up to Noble in Lexington. Lexington is right on Lake Huron and is one of Michigan’s many mini-resort small towns with fudge shops. Noble is a home and garden store housed in a beautiful 2 story building. We arrived, set up our food and then went to the outside garden where we were set to sign. We didn’t anticipate such intense heat though and by 11.30am it was over 90 degrees. Feeling that talking about our book while we were pouring sweat and constantly wiping it out of our eyes wasn’t the best selling technique, we moved indoors to take advantage of the A/C and the closer proximity to the store patrons. We were really pleased with everyone’s reception to the book. We sold a lot more books that expected and of course our extremely supportive family came out in full force to check out our very first book signing (which we hope to become quite historic).

Sunday - The bookbeat was the childhood bookstore where we grew up learning how to read and expanded our book consumption beyond the obvious harry potter-esque fare. Big special shout out goes to Sharon Zimmerman who was our personal reading guide as we were growing up and was there helping sell our cookbook. The Book Beat went so much better than we could have expected. The turnout was quadruple what we anticipated and we signed books for about 3 hours straight…not that we are complaining about that. We even had some walkups going to other stores who tasted the goods and then bought the book and that was one of the most exciting things to happen - total strangers convinced only by a taste of our food to buy our book.

Monday - Once again we spent all day in the kitchen. For this party we got to use the kitchen at eve - the restaurant so we were able to expand and make a much larger area incredibly messy as opposed to just the small kitchen at our parents’ house. We added a few dishes to the ones we had been cooking all weekend and were cooking right up until 6pm when the first people started showing up. The rest of the night is kind of a blur, it was basically everyone we knew in town who we hadn’t seen yet. The bar was open and there was tons of food, almost all of which got eaten which was quite a feat.

Big thanks go out to Sheldon and Gene of Noble Lexington, Cary and Colleen of Bookbeat and Eve Aronoff of eve - the restaurant for joining with us on our launch weekend to make it a huge success.