q&a with… barry c parsons {debut author series}

I first discovered Barry’s amazing blog, Rock Recipes, through the Food Bloggers of Canada community (of which we’re both members). When I heard that Barry was publishing a cookbook, it immediately went onto my wishlist.

I wasn’t disappointed. I haven’t had the book for very long, but from what I’ve read and tried out, this will definitely be a ‘go-to’ cookbook for many years to come (you can read my full review here). I was so happy when Barry agreed to take time out from his super-hectic schedule to answer a few questions for me.

Tell us a little about yourself.

As I say at the very start of the book, I am not a chef. I’m just a regular home cook who has had a life-long love affair with cooking and baking. I’m also a dad to two teenagers, Olivia and Noah, and husband to long-suffering Lynn, who has probably washed more dishes in a home kitchen in the past 8 years than any woman in Newfoundland.

I now write and blog full time.

Three fun facts about you that we wouldn’t read in your “official” bio.

Hmmm…let me see.

1. I am a messy cook. I don’t “clean as I go”, I push through to the end and deal with the havoc I wreak on a kitchen afterwards….(or most likely Spouse does. I told you she was long-suffering.)

2. I don’t do a lot of day-to-day grocery shopping either. When I shop it’s probably more for inspiration. I’m too impulsive a shopper and always bring home too much of everything I see. Again, Spouse keeps me in check.

3. Outside of cooking, I am a devoted fan of British TV. I watch far more British dramas, comedies, documentaries and cooking shows than anything produced in North America. I think the UK is my heart’s home. Maybe I’ll strike it rich and retire there one day.

You’ve been writing RockRecipes.com (the food blog) for seven years now. What made you start food blogging and what kept you going all this time?

My blog started mainly because of requests from family and friends who were asking for recipes for dishes they had tried at my house. I had always cooked out of my head, so I’d never written anything down. After writing several recipes for individual people, I decided it was better to probably post them on a blog so that I could send folks there when they asked for a recipe. It really did start only as a reference for the people I knew. I never had a plan for a blog or any ambitions for growth or direction. If you had told me back then that tens of thousands of people would visit my blog a day, I would have undoubtedly laughed out loud.

What keeps me blogging nowadays is the overwhelmingly positive feedback I get from people who discover Rock Recipes online and who have bought my book. It always reinvigorates me when people have such great successes with my recipes and let me know about them. There are endless possibilities in the kitchen and I really never tire of trying new things, exploring new ingredients and coming up with new combinations of flavours. It’s never boring.

You’ve successfully made the transition from blogger to published cookbook author. Any tips for other bloggers who aspire to write a cookbook?

Be prepared, it’s probably a lot more work than you think…especially when you have so many irons in the fire already. Recipe bloggers know how hard it is to keep a steady stream of new content coming and when you have to create at least some new content for a book at the same time, it can become very difficult to keep up. My strategy for both blogging and cookbook writing now is to stay ahead with content creation as much as possible. I keep about 15 – 20 recipes ahead of my content now, at least in photography and draft recipes. That way, if there is a recipe I want to hold in reserve for a cookbook, I don’t feel the same pressure to post it instead, just to keep the blog content stream going. If, in the end, the recipe doesn’t make it to the book, it can still be used for blog content.

Resisting the urge to post a recipe success immediately was the hardest part of disciplining myself to take this approach. I do get quite excited about a new dish that turns out really well and often want to share it right away. It takes a while to get to that point but it does take the pressure off on both sides of content demand.

What is your favourite recipe from Rock Recipes?

That’s always a difficult question and to be honest, there’s no real answer. With 1,400 recipes published to date, there are many, many favourites. One particular favourite, owing in large part to its great success is the recipe for Double Crunch Honey Garlic Chicken Breasts. It has had hundreds of great reviews, hundreds of thousands of Pinterest re-pins and millions of hits on my blog. It is a favourite of mine partly because it demonstrates how far something, which was conceived of in my little 10×10 kitchen in St. John’s, can go. It always amazes me how many people that recipe has reached.

Were there any recipes that didn’t make the cut or that you regret not including in Rock Recipes?

Because I have such a large amount of blog content to draw on for a first cookbook, choices were very difficult. There are about 100 recipes in the book, other than new content, that have previously been published on RockRecipes.com. My first list of potential recipes was around 400, so paring down that list to create a book that was balanced in categories, fan favourites and personal choices took quite a long time for me. I did hear from fans who were shocked that a recipe like their much-loved “Baked General Tso Chicken” which is consistently in our Top 10 recipes ever, did not make it to the book. That was a tough one but it came down to balancing the types of recipes in the whole book.

Is there anything in the kitchen that you haven’t figured out yet (recipe-wise) that is at the top of your “must master” list?

I’d say most of those sorts of things fall into the baking category for me, where precision and method are everything. Croissants are a great example. At Georgestown Bakery in my neighbourhood, they make fantastic croissants and my attempts to copy them have fallen short. I’ll still keep trying though.

For those who aren’t that familiar with Canada’s beautiful east coast, which recipes in Rock Recipes “defines” East-Coast cooking?

First of all, Newfoundlanders never refer to or think of themselves as East Coasters, just “Newfoundlanders”. Though the rest of Canada may think of this part of the country as having a collective culture, and though there are similarities, Newfoundland really has one all its own. Just by virtue of being on the mainland, the Maritime provinces are quite different.

The food culture here is very tied to the land and the sea because of centuries of isolation. The new explosion of interest in Newfoundland cooking, and the success of nationally known chefs like Todd Perrin and Jeremy Charles, is really tied to a modern interpretation of the tradition of making the most of local ingredients. Rock Recipes is more of a home-cooking cookbook overall and is not really intended to be a “Newfoundland” cookbook per se. Still, that local food philosophy and tradition does find its way into recipes like St. John’s Stout Stew or Ham and Split Pea Soup with Dough Boys. They are the kind of simple, hearty dishes that sustained Newfoundlanders for generations.

Besides the Rock, are there any other regions of Canada that inspire you food-wise?

Family vacations to Southern Ontario when I was a child, particularly excursions to the Niagara Peninsula, left me in awe of the variety of produce that is able to be grown there. Seeing cornfields for the first time or grapes growing on the vine were revelations to a young kid from Newfoundland where none of that is possible. My favourite was always summer peach season in that area and it is still the highlight of the summer for me when the Ontario peaches hit the shelves here. That first bite of a ripe juicy peach is still an instant memory of childhood for me. The abundance of summer peach recipes, especially, that I come up with during that time is directly related to my love of Southern Ontario.

Are there plans for a second cookbook?

There are indeed. In fact, it is written, photographed, mostly edited and now in the final design stage for release in early fall this year; just a year after my first book was published. Given the success of the first cookbook, Breakwater Books wanted to build on that accomplishment with a follow-up book right away.

The new cookbook will be a little larger, have double the new recipes developed just for the book, and include a good number of those favourite recipes that didn’t make it to Volume One. As with any endeavor, you learn a lot from doing anything for the first time and writing a cookbook is no different. I’m actually more pleased with the second book as it goes to print, than I was with book one. It’s still very much in the same easily-accomplishable, home-cooking vein that people have responded to and I hope they enjoy it as much as the first.

A very special thank you to Barry for taking the time to answer my questions! You can learn more about the Barry on his website, Rock Recipes, or by following Barry on Twitter @rockrecipes.

You can purchase Rock Recipes from The Book Depository (free worldwide shipping) or Amazon.

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