This is a continuation from yesterday’s post.

Now for the additional questions:

Tawra, Thanks so much for all that information. Very enlightening. I’m just the most curious (nosey) person in the world. I was interested in things like, were you and your Mom driving in the car one day and one of you said, “Hey, we’ve got all these recipes, and experience with scraping by. Let’s write a book!”

Well, yes, sort of. I read the Tightwad Gazette years before around 1992 and thought “wow, we do that and even more”. At the time I had no intention of writing a book. I went to school for horticulture and all I wanted to do was open my own greenhouse and herb farm.

I re-read the Tightwad Gazette when I was pregnant with my first baby in 1997. In there she said how everyone kept asking her to write a tightwad cookbook but she hated to cook and it would be too much work to do a good job. That is when I said “I could do that!”

I made the announcement to Mom and Mike that day and they both laughed and said “Ok”. (Their enthusiasm was under whelming!) I was one of the worst cooks you had ever seen. I burned everything! Ok, I confess there some days I still do! I figured if I could learn how to do it then others could do it too! Mike confessed a few months ago that if he would have known then what he knows now he would have told me “no way!”. He said he was just “being supportive” and didn’t think I would really do it! LOL

From the time I came up with the idea and started writing until we got the book back from the printer was 2 babies and 2 years later.

Did you two sit at the table night after night hammering out the book?

Well, sort of. I started writing and Mom would call or come over (she lived across the street at the time) and say “you need to be sure and tell them this…….” . That’s why in the front of the book I say I was the typist.

There were several times I printed it all out and we would sit and edit it and add more stuff.

Check back for Part 3 in 2 days! Tawra