We had a productive board meeting of the Chef’s Table Society today at Nu today (thanks for hosting us again Harry), and we’ll soon have some exciting news about an upcoming dinner that the Society is hosting this coming January. It’s hard to imagine Hidekazu Tojo, Vikram Vij, Scott jaeger, Dino Renaerts, David Hawksworth, Michel Jacob, Robert Clark, Mary Mackay, Nico Schuermans, Thomas Haas, Rob Feenie, and Daniel Boulud joining forces to prepare a meal, but they are.

I will likely be bussing tables. But more on that when we have everything finalised.

The meeting also touched on the moon that has been in constant orbit of my brain for the last couple of months: the book. I have about a week to finish the editorial content of the Chefs Table Society’s new cookbook, the working title of which is Vancouver Cooks 2.0. The recipes are being proofed by Julian Bond and his crew at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts, and edited by Joan Cross.

This has been my first “book” experience as a writer. I gotta say I used to think it would be a languid process involving a summer on Savary Island with a typewriter and cases of wine and cigarettes. Apparently not. It happens fast, and is a process that is shockingly and rather unromantically entangled in a web of emailed correspondence, pdf files, google docs, and other equally un-Fitzgeraldish modes of tappity tap tap. The folks at the publishing house of Douglas & MacIntyre have been very patient with us, perhaps owing to the volatility inherent to the task of compiling 120 recipes from 60 chefs (who’ve been wonderfully productive and patient as well). It’s going to be a good cookbook, I think, and something that all of the contributors and the Society can be proud of. My contributions on Scout might be light for the next two or three days as I go through the final biographical edits. I hope to sneak in some small posts here and there, but I’m glad I’m not the only one with keys.

After that, on with the beta build. Scout will be finished by January 1st and we’ll have a drink to celebrate.

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(front page carousel photo of chefs Don Letendre, Pino Posteraro, and John Bishop at our meeting today)