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Provo woman's 'Daily Meal Planner' is a cookbook with a history.
Lots of people think that they've had a hard-knock life. Now picture yourself as a mother of nine who becomes a widow when your youngest child is just five weeks old. That's what happened to Provo resident Joan Day Brady, who was 40 when her first husband, Arthur Day, died of a heart attack after being treated for internal bleeding.
"There were a lot of hungry days. There were times when we climbed into dumpsters in the back of grocery stores and got their fruits and vegetables out," said Brady. "We went to the butcher and asked for bones for the dog -- but we didn't have a dog."
The kids are fine. So is Brady, who eventually remarried and now has 13 kids (her new husband brought six children to the marriage), 64 grandchildren, and an uncertain number of great-grandchildren ("There's quite a few; I gave up counting"). Challenges don't get her down. There's not much that does. How else to explain publishing a book at age 76 despite only being able to type with one finger? (The condition is the result of an old injury that has gradually made it extremely difficult for Brady to use her hands for typing and similar activities.)
Brady pulled it off just last month when Springville-based Cedar Fort printed her Daily Meal Planner: A Busy Homemaker's Answer to Simplified Menu Planning. It has the wisdom of decades in the kitchen distilled down to 149 pages and some recipes. OK, a lot of recipes -- more than 300 of them.
You learn a great deal when there are all of those mouths to feed. So do the owners of the mouths. In addition to having a house rule that every eater had to at least taste every food prepared, Brady saw to it that there was plenty of help in the preparation phase.
"By the time that the children were raised," she said, "even the boys were good cooks." Brady's son, Wally Day, is an engineer who lives in Payson and has fond memories of his mother's Chicken Rice Casserole. "It's actually very simple" to prepare, he said, listing off the ingredients to prove it. Or maybe it just seems simple to Day because he learned to make it himself long ago. (Ask the other guys in your office how many of them know how to make a casserole from scratch with no recipe, Wally.) And Wally's own children now enjoy Brady's cooking as much as their dad does. "They always love going over" to grandma's house, he said.
The idea to write a cookbook that included a guide to planning meals is something that Brady hit on "about 15 years ago," she said. She prepared an initial draft that, to her disappointment, didn't raise much interest -- a failure that she now views philosophically.
"I didn't have it fine-tuned enough," she said.
The manuscript stuck around, however, and a sister eventually suggested that Brady print it up herself and distribute it as a Christmas gift. Once the aspiring author made some copies of her own, however, the itch to publish returned.
As Brady put it, "I thought, 'I'm going to just see if it's a little more feasible now.'"
She took a copy of what she'd made over to Cedar Fort, where it ended up on the desk of acquisitions editor Lee Nelson, author of the locally popular "Storm Testament" novels.
Round 2 almost ended right there. "I thought, 'Who in the world wants a book on planning their meals for a whole year?' " Nelson said. "I get hungry at 4 and wander by the store."
On the other hand, Nelson said, he looks for how-to authors "with credentials and experience, who are really qualified to tell me how to do something." Brady's book measured up to that standard, he said, so he took it to a sales meeting.
The salespeople, Nelson said, particularly the women, practically stood up and cheered.
Like a lot of authors, Brady experienced the disappointment of having her book's title changed (her initial idea was "In the Season Thereof"). She also was dismayed to hear that the cover she'd designed would be replaced -- at least until she saw the new design, and loved it.
"They know what they're doing, thank goodness," she said. (The new cover features bright colors and a calendar-like grid with enticing pictures of different foods in each box on the grid.) One thing that required extensive effort from both parties was double-checking the recipes. "Even though I went over it
and over it," Brady said, "there's still some mistakes that were made."
Cedar Fort editor Heather Holm said that checking measurements and ingredients is the most difficult part of editing a cookbook. There's not a test kitchen -- "We never go that far," said Holm -- but there is a lot of cross-checking against the original manuscript, and even a tiny amount of guesswork. A good editor, Holm said, knows enough about food preparation to spot, for example, when the occasional measurement should be teaspoon instead of tablespoon.
Besides typing with one finger, Brady surfs the Internet with one finger and does one-fingered genealogy. There are some things that she doesn't do at all anymore: She once enjoyed painting.
"She painted the Provo Temple and she painted a photograph of my grandpa and grandma," Day said. "Those are the two that I remember most."
And in addition to the trouble that she has with her hands, Brady suffers from fibromyalgia, a disorder characterized by chronic muscle pain.
"I figure I can stay in bed and hurt, or I can do something and hurt," she said. "When you have that choice, then I'd rather just find things to do."
One thing she'd like is to help other people understand that they can still realize their dreams in spite of injury or disability. Or even just help them go from day to day without feeling down.
It's not just something that Brady preaches. Barbara Leavitt, a neighbor who moved to Provo about 18 months ago, said that Brady's friendship has helped her to deal with losing her husband to cancer.
"She's always very positive, very upbeat," Leavitt said. "I think she'll be one of those who really lives up to the day she dies."
Leavitt also has had a personal copy of "Daily Meal Planner" (in its pre-Cedar Fort format) for about a year and said that she uses it often. (The recipe for pumpkin pie is a favorite.)
"It's so practical," Leavitt said. "It's nice to go to a book and you can just say, 'OK, what am I going to have today?' You can go to a particular day and have the decision made for you." (Take that, Lee Nelson!)
Brady has written another book she'd like to publish called "My Middle Name is Job or: How to Come Up Smiling." If that doesn't happen, then she's happy just to have "Daily Meal Planner" where it might do somebody else a bit of good.
"I got my biggest thrill when a middle-aged lady told me, 'This is gold, pure gold,' " she said. "It made all of my effort feel like it was worthwhile."
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