Kickstarter

Hi Backers,

An incredibly warm thank-you for your support of our project!

Though Kickstarter was unsuccessful, we are continuing full-steam ahead with the project and checking out other funding sources. We will not be re-attempting Kickstarter, but we welcome direct donations to Locally Delicious via check or online at our website, www.locally-delicious.org (Paypal link will be up in a few days, hopefully Monday). If you choose to donate directly, a copy of Lunchbox Envy will be available for a $25 donation.

The book is progressing rapidly and we just received two glowing reviews from a graphic designer and a professor and father in the community. This has given us a burst of energy in our revising, editing, and photography.

By "the show must go on",  we are also referring to the fact that we have an upcoming fundraiser, The Red Velvet Cake Wars at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka, CA. If you live on the North Coast, please consider joining us for a fantastic show, delicious Red Velvet Cake and Champagne - proceeds from the night will be donated to Locally Delicious in support of Lunchbox Envy. 

Check Locally Delicious out on Facebook and Twitter. We'd love to hear from you and let you know how Lunchbox Envy is progressing - email us at info@locally-delicious.org.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

Recipes
Its unbelievable, but perhaps, just maybe..... yes! Its true! Kate has finished inputting our around 90 recipes into templates co-designed by the Arcata High Arts Institute graphic design team. The "Recipe Committee, a smaller group of Locally Delicious members tasked with gathering, creating and adapting the recipes, will now hold a final content review of our recipes. This will sadly involve cutting a number of recipes, but it has been only after seeing them in their final formatting that we have spotted redundancies and gained an accurate idea of our available page space. Its a sad process to let go of recipes that we have tested, enjoyed, revised, re-tested, groaned over and delighted in. But letting go, as we all know, is necessary.

Icons
We have close-to-final versions of the icons that will be used to indicate the recipe level and the MyPlate nutritional components. Once again, the AAI Illustrators have done a great job. Thanks AAI! Our icons are intended to make it easier to determine which recipes to cook when in a hurry as well as assisting with Meal Planning from Chapter 1: Planning and Packing (See Chapter Cover at bottom).

Skill Levels: The three recipe levels are "beginning", "intermediate", and "challenge yourself." They are indicated by the icons of a little hand, a bigger hand, and a chef's hat. Though all children are beginners, not all beginners are children. This is why we have categorized our recipes by the skills required to complete them, rather than age level. The skills associated with each level will be described in the introduction of Chapter 5: Recipes. The icons below are for an intermediate level recipe. The shading of both little and big hand demonstrate that beginning and intermediate level cooks can work together on an intermediate level recipe.

MyPlate Components: Below are the icons for the various MyPlate components, which include protein, grain, vegetable, fruit, dairy (and other calcium-rich foods). We hope that food items we have chosen for these symbols will be the most archetypal form of each component. In other words, the symbols are not necessarily representative of our recipe ingredients. For example, we have far more recipes using beans as the main protein rather than a leg of chicken. Also, we are sure to include many sources of calcium other than dairy for all our non-dairy eating and lactose-intolerant readers.

Graphic Novel
Today the group reviewed the text of the entire graphic novel. The novel is 90 colorful frames of action, adventure, magical altered-reality, and ultimate healthy food system success! We are wishing that we lived in the simple world of the graphic novel - but oh well, it makes for a good tale.

Chapter Covers
As the AAI students finish chapter covers, we continue to be delighted by their whimsical nature and beautiful colors. Below is the chapter cover for Chapter 2: Where to Get Food.

Recipes
Our work with recipes at the moment is not nearly as exciting as reviewing the art by AAI, but so so necessary. We are buried deep in the nitty gritty of writing a book. At the moment, we are doing all the following things: imputing recipes into templates, making small changes to layout, developing and updating style guides, passing on finished recipes for editing, double-checking, discussing, debating, arguing, making up, moving on and moving forward. Phew. We keep reminding ourselves of the very true phrase, "two steps forward, one step back." Ahh Process!

Colors
Today we are having the new colors proofed at Bug Press in Arcata! So far, we’ve only seen the colors printed on a variety of home printers, which vary widely in tone and quality. We are very excited to see what the new colors will look like after professional printing!

Recipes
Today we consulted Treyce from the AAI graphic design team about various template layout possibilities for the recipes. Kate has finished placing the Main Dish recipes into our templates and is about to embark upon the smaller sections, which include Basics, Fruits, Drinks, Treats & Snacks.

The Main Dish is the largest chunk of the recipes. It includes: 1. Sandwiches & Wraps, 2. Grains: Noodles and Rice, 3. Egg-based dishes (ex. Frittata), 4. Salads, and 5. Soups. Each of these 5 categories will start with a Formula – which will teach how to create a well-balanced dish a wide variety of ingredients. We hope that the combination of our open-ended formulas with the specific examples provided by the recipes will help young and beginning cooks to begin creating original dishes.

AAI Illustrator Team
The AAI Illustrators are almost at the end of their journey with Locally Delicious, and what a journey it has been! In a less flowery manner of speaking, when asked to comment on the process, the team said unanimously, “It’s a lot of clicking!” The team of three illustrators is Jon Nordberg and Kelsey and Morgan Tomfohr.

The team is currently:
- finalizing the chapter covers and the book cover
- putting the graphic novel into 3-panel strips,
- finishing the illustrations and drawings of “power figures” pulled out of the graphic novel who will be relaying kid-oriented information within the main text of Chapters 1-4.

Photo 1 below is the current draft of the book cover. The lines in red represent the placement & action of the power figures who are being drawn in as I type!

Photo 2 is a draft of the Chapter Cover for Ch 4: Getting Started Cooking, which is an overview of kitchen safety, cooking techniques used in the recipes, necessary and "nice to have" tools.

Graphic Design

After a graphic design “checking in” meeting with professional graphic designers, Ann Bown-Crawford (Director of AAI), Treyce Meredith (student graphic designer), and the Illustrator team, we’ve made some changes to the color scheme and layout of the book. The biggest change has been to simplify and improve the color coordination between the graphic novel and the rest of the content. The colors in the Color Palette may still undergo some minor changes, but you get the idea... It’s looking more and more beautiful every day. 
 
End-of-Book Resources
We’ve added a few new useful resources to the end of the book. A how-to visual guide to reading ingredients labels will complement discussion of reading labels in Chapter 3.  A chart created based on the USDA MyPlate will show the variations in recommended portion sizes for children. This will complement more general wisdom about portions in Chapter 1. After many discussions, we've decided that including one seasonality chart would be confusing when we don't know where all of our readers live. Instead, we will provide online resources for looking up what’s in season in your region. We’ve woven much discussion eating in-season produce throughout the book.

Number of Pages
As we continue to place our recipes into the templates, we now have a realistic page estimate – 208 pages. The recipes will make up the bulk of the book, but Do-It-Yourself projects also a fair number of pages because of the step-by-step layout and photos. 


It really is an incredible experience to look at our dreams and imaginings turning into a reality.