“Survival” is the mindset for most families when school-time cooking comes around; cookbook author, blogger, and mother Laura Keogh knows this first hand. She, along with partner Ceri Marsh, merged their editorial and family cooking knowledge together to create The School Year Survival Cookbook. Full of strategies, tips, and recipes, their book helps families eat healthy (not to mention deliciously) during the hectic school year.
“Easy is definitely the name of the game,” Keogh says about their latest cookbook. Both she and Marsh previously worked as journalists at FASHION Magazine in Toronto, Canada. Before having kids, her relationship with food was much different than it is today; eating out frequently and saving cooking for dinner parties and holidays. “It wasn’t a grind, it was this exciting thing, it was planned. You have all this time to do it,” Keogh explains.
After having her daughter Scarlett, her life, as well as her eating, changed completely. Fearing taking a newborn to a restaurant, she started eating more at home. “I went from cocktails and canapés, to flipping pancakes,” Keogh says.
Health was always a big focus for her, as well as for Marsh. The two started their food and health reporting during their time at the FASHION. “We started noticing chefs were celebrities in the early aughts, so we brought a lot of food to the fashion magazine. We kind of tackled food like we did being journalists,” Keogh explains. It was during this time that they started their food blog, sweetpotatochronicles.com, The blog grew and they came out with their first, and bestselling book, How to Feed a Family.
During their How to Feed a Family book tour, interviewers with kids expressed interest in realistic ways to cook the great recipes in the book, while managing work and family. “We really started noticing that they weren’t just looking for recipes, they were looking for strategies,” Keogh says. “So we realized we need to take our routines and put them down on paper in an easy and digestible way that other people can do.” And so The School Year Survival Cookbook was born.
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Their cookbook takes the guesswork and difficult steps of recipes out and replaces them with strategies and things you can do in advance to make cooking during the busy time as easy as possible. The book even features a leftover’s section, unheard of for most cookbooks. Keogh mentions she and Marsh really had to state their case to get it in the book. “Families use leftovers. Things that were traditionally very unsexy, the necessity was there,” Keogh states.
She wanted to make sure everything was covered in the book, even giving advice to parents with picky eaters. “I always tell parents with picky eaters to not take it personally,” she explains. “I almost pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s just a phase, children go through a million phases. ‘You don’t like broccoli steamed? Let’s try it roasted or its going in a casserole or Parmesan fritter.’ You just keep putting it in front of them, eventually they will come around.”
In order to make things easy, ingredients like eggs were a base for a lot of the recipes. “It can be frittata that uses leftovers, or it can be pasta, things that come together really quickly, and for the most part are really universally easy for kids,” Keogh says. She notes the sun-dried-crusted tomato salmon as a favorite for her daughter as well as the penne and butter chicken as weekly staples in her house. And for dessert? The grunt is the winner for her.
As for another cookbook, Keogh and Marsh are hard at work constantly updating their website to include new recipes and strategies for busy families. “There’s still so much to be said and done for making lives easier for parents,” Keogh says, “And I could see this book, which was more about strategy, morphing into ‘here are the meals you can do in your sleep.’ Something that makes it so easy that its just easy for families.”
To learn more, visit sweetpotatochronicles.com!
