Candied Asian Orchids

To celebrate the incredible efforts of Passports With Purpose to raise a school in Cambodia, this week’s Wander Food Wednesday is dedicated to Sweet Asian Orchids. These delicate candied flowers are easy to make and almost always bring oh’s and ah’s when served!

The recipe is modified from Epicurious.

Ingredients:
edible flowers (organic, pesticide-free)
superfine sugar
1 egg white, at room temperature
1/4 cup water

To Prepare:
Brush petals with an egg white that is slightly beaten with a couple of drops of water.
Hold the petal with a tweezer, and sprinkle with superfine sugar. Tap the tweezer to remove excess sugar.
Remove to a rack to dry completely. Store in an airtight container.
Sugared flowers can be made in advance and stored with minimal wilting for up to one week.

This is the last week to support Passports With Purpose, so be sure to donate and GOOD LUCK winning those awesome prizes!
ENJOY!

These days it’s becoming easier to stay connected than ever before. World phones, Wi-Fi in the sky, SKYPE, and the Internet put us just a few clicks from all our Tweets and Peeps. We can upload photos on FaceBook, a video on YouTube, and update a Fan Page all within seconds of seeing the Eiffel Tower or climbing the Great Wall of China. It’s all about sharing the experience, we think as the SEND button is pressed.

But is all this connectivity a good thing? Back in the days before digital, it could be weeks before the film got developed and you forced friends and family over to suffer through yet another vacation slide show. During that time you hoped the film didn’t get ruined in the heat of your suitcase or the airport x-ray, but it forced us to take things a bit slower. More time was spent in conversation than at a keyboard. A scenic view had to be savored in the mind’s eye, rather than behind a video camera. Getting to know the people surrounding you was more important than sharing the view with those back home.

Has the influx of “connected travel” made you wonder? Are we missing something vital in our manic desire to record every image and share every moment? Should some moments while traveling belong solely to the individual?

I’m torn. I LOVE to take pictures. Pictures help me jog memories months later when my brain might have been filled to capacity while traveling. I enjoy re-living the experience through videos, especially the laughs shared. But I also am aware of so many times my focus is on recording the experience rather than living the experience.

How do you feel? Is “connected travel” a wonderful new friend or moocher of true memories and experience?

We’d be in good company.

Edgar Allen Poe did it. So did Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and John Grisham.

The “pro” list was much larger than the “cons”
•The book could be available within six months instead of two years.
•We’d be responsible for all of the marketing and PR ourselves, but I’d had two other books published by Big Houses (St. Martin’s Press and Putnam) and those things were my responsibility then, too.
•Starting a Small Press would require learning an entirely new skill set, but could open doors for other writers struggling to have their voices heard.

We decided to do it. Create a Small Press, give it a name and an identity, and publish our first book. Details, details, details. Checklists and scribbled notes everywhere.

The book will be out by the end of this month!

It’s been a long road, filled with potholes and gorgeous roadside vistas in equal measure. But opening the package containing the proof copy this week made it all worthwhile. We created a book! It’s not perfect yet, so here come the first round of revisions, but it’s darn close. And did I mention it was beautiful?

For the next few posts, we’d like to share some of the steps we took to make this dream a reality, so others don’t have to “re-invent the wheel” like I felt we did most of the time.

The Birth of a Book (Part 1)

Become a Publisher. Sounds daunting? It’s not. First you’ll need a name. We chose Wander Press because we’re both huge fans of J.R.R. Tolkien and his adage “Not all those who wander are lost.” And with all of the wandering we’ve been doing around the world, it seemed to fit.
Next, we registered the domain name, company, and set up a free blog at Word Press to get started. We were ready to introduce Wander Press to the world!

Choose a printer. As a previously published author with boxes of books stacked in the garage, it was important this time for us to use POD (print-on-demand) technology. We move around a lot, so book storage would be impossible. Also, we needed to find a printer with a great distribution system. Lightning Source was our choice. Their affiliation with Ingram, the global distributor for Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and Baker and Taylor would make getting the books to friends and family around the world easy.

Next post will focus on finding ISBN numbers, Library of Congress Control numbers, and Book Cover software. If you have specific questions about the process, please let us know and we’ll do our best to get you an answer!