The Creation of the Cook Book

The idea behind The Little Balcony blog came from the idea that I wanted to create a cook book. I love cooking and I have so many recipes cut out of magazines, scribbled down ingredients from TV shows I've seen. Not to mention the small collections of cook books I already own, some of which hold some of my most favorite dishes, which I've adapted over the years to my own tast.

But also being a keen and not so adventurous vegetable gardener, usually only tomatoes, herbs, chili and peppers and the odd strawberry plant. I though I might see how hard it was to grow more exciting fruit and vegetables and use these in the recipes I had started to put together for the cook book, from the large selection I'd collected over the years and the many recipes my mother has taught me.

Having only a small balcony I knew this would be a challenge, but I started to buy the 'Grow Your Own' garden magazine, plus others, which sometimes come with free seeds, as well the RHS book 'Vegetables in a Small Garden' and I started to put a plan together to see which fruit and vegetables were suitable to grow in pots, planters and hanging baskets and this is how The Little Balcony blog and cook book started.

Now I can't take credit for the name, this came from my boyfriend Zac, but all the balcony garden planning and growing I have done, except the chilies. Having decided to create a book, I did a lot of research on creating your own book and remembered a friend had done this with a website called BLURB, I registered with them. I then spent sometime looking at other peoples designs on the site and decided I wanted to create a cook book of easy recipes that could be cooked any day of the week and would appeal to everybody.

Slowly I started to create a list of dishes and before I knew it I had nearly 40 recipes, ranging from starters to deserts as well as jams, dressings and drinks and all of which contain ingredients that I could grow on my balcony. I also started to develop a strong idea of how I visually saw the book. Now I'm not going to give too much away, but the ideas for the page designs slowly came to me, so from having an idea of what I wanted to appear on the pages I started to plan what I could grow and recorded this through this blog.