For foodies, trying as many different dishes as possible can create a conundrum. I want that, and that … and that. What if every dish you had a craving for could be cooked and consumed in a single bite? That’s the mission of Tiny Food Party!, which provides bite-size recipes for miniature meals
The book is filled with one-bite shepherd’s pie, chicken and waffles, and tiny Philly cheese-steak sandwiches. In the intro, authors Teri Lyn Fisher and Jenny Park write, “your parents may have taught you to never play with your food, but in this book we encourage it.” It could be the most diverse hors d’oeuvre cookbook yet. Fisher and Park run SpoonForkBacon.com, a website dedicated to gorgeous food styling and quirky recipes. Creative Loafing spoke with Jenny Park, one half of SpoonForkBacon, about their book of teeny-weeny foods. Tiny Food Party! comes out Oct. 9.
Creative Loafing: I loved that many of the recipes were composed of easy-to-find ingredients, but also had a few exotic ingredients as well. Was that on purpose?
Jenny Park: Absolutely! We both live in Los Angeles and have access to amazing food from all over the place, so when we decided to do a cookbook we made sure to incorporate some of our favorite international dishes with somewhat exotic ingredients in hopes to encourage people to step outside what they are used to in the food realm.
How were the recipes chosen? What were you thinking about when you decided which recipes to include?
Besides incorporating some of our own favorite foods, we really wanted this book to lend itself to cooking with a bit of nostalgia by taking some familiar (and not so familiar) foods and transforming them into fun bite-sized treats.
How long did you spend putting Tiny Food Party! together? Just about a year of hard work … lots of taste-testing along the way, and we’re both totally okay with that!
How long has your blog, SpoonForkBacon, been going? Did that experience factor into making this book?
Our blog turned 1 at the end of August (2012) which was really exciting for us. Creating a book was actually the inspiration behind our blog; we had been working together on jobs and creative projects for a while when we got the opportunity to create our own cookbook. SpoonForkBacon is an opportunity for us to let our creativity go crazy, it’s our “on-going” internet cookbook.
Why did you choose to do a cookbook of tiny foods? What do you like about smaller foods over full entrees?
We both really love to entertain and have get-togethers. Nothing against entrees whatsoever, but when we’re inviting a bunch of people over, bite-sized foods are the way to go.
Who did you write this cookbook for?
We wrote it for people exactly like us, who like to entertain, but want really fun and different foods to serve the next time they entertain. We wrote it for people who are adventurous (or want to be) in the kitchen, and like to have fun.
This article appears in Sep 27 – Oct 3, 2012.