Ok, here it is, the epic, big, crazy, AMAZING news… I’m going to have a cookbook!!
Did your heart just explode? No? Just me then! Because I’m dying. I am so stinking excited I feel like I’m going to pass out at any moment but I’ll try and stay coherent long enough to give you all the juicy details.
This summer I put together a proposal for a cookbook with the help of my amazing team here at Chic HQ… honestly, even choosing the outfit for the front of the proposal took us like three hours! Anyway, I’ve wanted to do a cookbook forever but I wanted to wait until I had a really clear idea of what I could offer, that y’all haven’t seen a million times already. And then in it hit me… what if I did a whole book full of the down-home, redneck, hillbilly, Okie recipes I grew up eating? Even better, what if I styled them in a beautiful way so that they were pretty enough to serve to even the fanciest guest? What if I did that and the whole book was a mix of really fancy things and things I got at a yard sale or the bargain bin? What if that concept weaved it’s way throughout the cookbook the same way it weaves itself throughout my daily life? It’s a little bit fancy… it’s a little bit white trash… it’s Fancy Trash!
Now the fancy people get… the Trash, is a little harder for them to swallow. Let me explain. I came from very humble beginnings. I literally grew up on a street called Weedpatch Highway and the first time I heard the term White Trash was when I little girl in second grade screamed it at me across the playground. I wasn’t old enough to understand what it meant, but I was old enough to understand that my hand-me-down clothes and my original zip code made me somehow less than she was. As an adult I became a high end event planner… literally the furthest thing from the life I’d grown up with. Now that I’m an adult and very comfortable with exactly who I am, I embrace both sides of myself… the fancy pants who gets to go to the Oscars every year and that little girl from Weedpatch who thinks there’s nothing better than her Mama’s chicken n’ dumplings.
And so I created a proposal (which is what you do with a book idea) and off it went to NYC. And not everyone got the concept, like, at all. I imagine polished editors wearing pencil skirts and oversized hipster glasses sitting at their desks in Manhattan going, “Um, she wants to call it what? And it’s about what??” Lots of them asked for conference calls with me (apparently this is also what you do with a book idea) but then they got on the phone and tried to change the book into something else. “Yes but couldn’t it be just high-end?” or “What if it was just the Chic side of things?” And it was really disappointing because I was so excited about this concept and I knew there was a place for it in the world. But then my new editor (squee!) saw the proposal and loved it… but more importantly, she got it. She got the Fancy and the Trashy and she believes, like I believe, that there are a lot of people out there who don’t just want to see cupcakes styled on $75 dessert plates. They need to know how to take something humble and serve it in a way that makes them feel special… because everyone deserves the chance to live beautifully, not just people with money.
So the Chic team and I will start working on Fancy Trash and it will take a while… I’ll tell you right now, this sucker isn’t going to come out until 2016. But guys, it’s going to be so beautiful and encouraging and helpful and I know you will love it! When I told the team at Chic that the team at Thomas Dunne was going to buy Fancy Trash I was so overwhelmed I started crying like a baby. Building this site and this brand takes so much time and energy and sometimes it feels like pushing a boulder up a hill. But then something like this happens and I realize that there are people who get what we’re doing. There are people who think there is a place for this kind of content in the world.
Thank you so very much for all your love and support and for helping Chic get bigger every day. I can’t wait to show you what we do with this project. xo, Rachel
