DIGITAL BURNT BASQUE CHEESECAKE RECIPE ZINE
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First, let me say thank you to each and single one of you for your support.
This zine wouldn’t have been possible without your generous support and encouragement.
Tom and I are super excited (and maybe a little nervous) to finally share our first zine with the world!
ZINE MAKING PROCESS:
I know I’ve been talking about this zine for a while. The idea was born out of Tom and I’s personal histories with physical media and books. We’re in our late 30’s and love card catalogs, choose your own adventure books, and had penpals in school when they were teaching us cursive. If you haven’t spent hours geeking out over Eyewitness Books, you really missed out. I think we were both babysat by the library and spent way too much of our adolescence unsupervised in those library stacks. Not to mention our past careers!
Tom had the idea for a zine first. It started like any zine—pen, paper, photocopier. We were going to print them and drop them off at the post office every month. It was really ziney. Also, at that time, I was working on several cookbook proposals and we were doing photos for those. The experience was new for us. We learned A LOT. Honestly, much of what we learned is that we don’t enjoy working in traditional and formal publishing environments with agents and editors and, well, too many cooks in the kitchen. There is a complete loss of creative control and we weren’t satisfied with whatever it is that’s left over. It felt cheap and profit driven.
Our experiences there changed the idea for our zine. We worried about the practicality and logistics of what we wanted to do—and what did we hope to accomplish? What do we want to provide to people? Tom and I have a whole thing about cookbooks being impractical image galleries today, so we wanted to go back to the basics. Who needs highly stylized photographs telegraphing unrealistic expectations of your food? Leave that stuff to our bodily beauty standards in fashion media, right? We want to cook! We want to eat great food!
So let’s make a zine that’s clear, concise, and informative—something that starts to remind us of Eyewitness Books we had enjoyed as kids, something that is as useful as the service manual and technical manuals, and something that you don’t have to be precious with.
We decided to go in the direction of less is more. Tell you and show you just the important parts because the rest is only needless stuff to sweat over. We decided to begin with a digital zine because we plainly don’t know what visual style to go with. Tom learned new programs (Scribus for this zine, but Affinity for our next and future editions) and I dug into some excellent food writing workshops and cookbook research. So expect to see experimentation in style and presentation! We really want to hear everyone’s feedback too.
All of that said, we did a lot of this on the back burner because, well, life.
We can’t express the gratitude that we have for your patience in this strange little journey that’s just beginning. Tom’s a lot more confident with his process, I’m a lot more confident with my writing, and we are both so excited to see how this zine idea grows and changes.
Ultimately we want to print these individual zines and offer them in a material that you can roll, fold, and carry in your back pocket. Something you can annotate in a wet and ingredient messy kitchen.
Each printed zine would act like a chapter and we’d offer a sleeve, clamshell box, or leather folio to hold the collection of zines as they’re printed. Tom’s really excited to bring his decade plus of fine arts preservation and conservation experience to this project, and in his heart he is a disruptive punk and has such strong convictions about making a quality and accessible object for people to use.
Thank you again for being a part of our creative and food-loving community.
We are already working on our next zine!
PURCHASING THE BURNT BASQUE CHEESECAKE RECIPE ZINE:
Free subscribers can purchase and download the Burnt Basque Cheesecake Recipe Zine for only $2.00 following the link below through itch.io.
If you are having issues with payment please send me a message or email (olgakoutseridi@gmail.com), and we will get it resolved!
Without further ado, here is the BURNT BASQUE CHEESECAKE RECIPE ZINE!