The University of Kentucky Woman's Club Cookbook, "Stay for Tea: The Centennial Edition," featuring modified recipes from UK nutrition and food sciences students, is now available for purchase.
The cookbook's release is in honor of the club's 100th anniversary. The students modified recipes from previous editions of the "Stay for Tea" series using 21st century techniques to make them healthier and easier to prepare.
"It was a really good experience all around," said Melissa LeVine, chair of the cookbook committee and outgoing president of the UK Woman's Club. "One of the things we've wanted to work on as a group was increasing our interactions with different areas of the university, and this project is a perfect example of that. It's an end product that we can really be proud of."
Recipe modifications were made during the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009 in experimental foods classes taught by Tammy Stephenson and Kwaku Addo, lecturer and associate professor, respectively, in the UK School of Human Environmental Sciences.
Students modified around 100 recipes for the project. Of those, half were chosen to run in the cookbook with no changes, one-quarter of the recipes included modifications by students and Woman's Club members, and the other fourth were recipes chosen directly from one of the three previous cookbooks and modified by Woman's Club members.
Courtney Belden, a senior human nutrition major, modified a beef roll recipe using low-fat and low-sodium options.
"I learned that you can eliminate fat easily and make things healthier by your choice of meat and using products that are lower in sodium and fat," she said.
For some students, like Feai Wong, now a UK graduate student in dietetics administration, the cookbook project opened their eyes and taste buds to dishes they had never tried before.
"I had never heard of Spanish pork chops before, and now I use it as one of my signature dishes," Wong said.
The cookbook project was so successful that Addo and Stephenson continue to use this hands-on teaching method.
"This project has actually led to further opportunities for students to do recipe modifications with other groups," Stephenson said.
The cookbook costs $20, plus $5 for shipping and handling. To order, send checks made out to the UKWC Aid Fund to Melissa LeVine, 2345 Abbeywood Road, Lexington, KY 40515.
Proceeds from the cookbook sales go to the UK Woman's Club scholarship fund. The club awards scholarships to non-traditional UK students each year. In the past 10 years, the club has given more than $180,000 in scholarships. In the current school year, the club awarded three full-tuition undergraduate scholarships and $13,000 in graduate fellowships.