(Kim Raff | The Salt Lake Tribune) (from left) Lauren Adamson, Kendra Adamson, Camille Beckstrand, and Elyse Ellis, are four of the six Utah sisters that published the cookbook "Six Sisters' Stuff" and are challenging readers to eat dinners as a family, are photographed at Smith's Food and Drug in Farmington on March 11, 2013.

Mormon bloggers feeding America dinner ideas

Mormon cookbooks » Out-of-state cooks drawn to the simple recipes.

By Heather May

| The Salt Lake Tribune

First Published Mar 19 2013 08:24 am • Last Updated Apr 05 2013 11:07 am

Dinner time meant family time in the Adamson household. It was often the only time the six sisters and their parents were all together.

When the female siblings started their own families, they missed that mealtime connection. To keep in touch, they started the "Six Sisters’ Stuff" blog.

The had no idea that their family tradition would have such wide-spread appeal or turn into what they say is a six-figure business.

The Six Sisters’ Stuff book, published last month, is the latest so-called Mormon cookbook, which is reaching an audience beyond Utah’s borders.

"We really feel like that’s what has kept our family close, is that every day we could sit down together and we would talk and would just be able to communicate," said Camille Beckstrand, who at 28 is the oldest of the sisters.

The economy and some cultural curiosity— six sisters is rather unusual outside of Utah— is why audiences in New York, Texas and California are eating up the Mormon offerings even more than Utah cooks.

Besides Six Sisters’ Stuff, other books with a Mormon bent include Our Best Bites: Mormon Moms in the Kitchen, Savoring the Seasons with Our Best Bites, and Favorite Family Recipes. All are published by Deseret Book or one of its subsidiaries, and they emphasize cooking and dinner as a fun, family affair.

While Mormon cookbook staples like Lion House Classics remain top Deseret Book sellers, younger audiences want updated recipes.

"The Lion House cookbooks were appealing to a more established, mature audience who has grown up knowing about the Lion House and the Hotel Utah," said Jana Erickson, with Deseret Book.

These books cater to busy moms needing to quickly feed a hungry brood. And they’re written by women whose cooking credentials include keeping their families well-fed.

Best bites • Kate Jones, a Utah native and Louisiana resident, along with her business partner Sara Wells are making a living publishing the "Our Best Bites" blog and books. As a newlywed, Jones said she made peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches and Rice-a-Roni for dinner most days. She’d spend her time and money on one to two nice meals each week she could afford.

She said home cooks turn to someone like her because they want "solid results without having to have all this formal training."

Recipes from celebrity chefs or restaurants aren’t practical or are scaled back in size and never taste as intended, she said. "Where in the world am I going to find calf cheeks? What is my family going to do when I cook them? No one’s going to eat it."

The Great Recession helped jump start their careers. The Best Bites blog launched in 2008 when readers were searching for ways to eat economically. Now, the "Best Bites" blogs gets 2 million unique visits a month. And their first book, published in 2011, is Deseret Book’s top-selling cookbook.

Jones said it was the publisher who pushed the "Mormon moms" subtitle because a cookbook called "Mennonite Girls Can Cook" was popular at the time. But she’s not entirely sure what Mormon cooking is. If it’s casseroles and funeral potatoes and Jell-O, she and Wells are trying to redefine it.

"We have one recipe [out of 700] on the whole blog that’s cream of anything," Jones said. "We pride ourselves on that. There are options beyond cream of chicken and cream of mushroom without going to the other extreme of cooking super gourmet meals every single night."

Instead, many of the recipes in the book are quick to make and largely made from scratch, such as spinach-chicken stromboli or steak and mango salad.

"We do like to be quick and easy. We also like to show people they can cook good, healthy food with real ingredients," Jones said.

Like mom made • On the Favorite Family Recipes blog, cooks will occasionally find recipes — such as beef stroganoff or easy Crock-Pot pork chops — that use creamed soup from a can. But some of the site’s most popular recipes are those that copy meals from national restaurant chains such as Outback Steakhouse, Cafe Rio, Olive Garden, Panda Express and Nothing Bundt Cake.

Author Erica Walker said she asks waiters for recipes and just experiments. The 28-year-old is now writing an ebook on how to copycat.

"With the economy right now, a lot of people can’t afford to go out," she said.

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