Back in February, I met Amy Cyrex Sins in the lobby of the Windsor Court to chat about her book project. I hear pitches all the time, but since we've only published two books (with our third, Last of the Red Hot Poppas, coming next month), I'm by no means a jaded publisher. I enjoy hearing the book ideas of others, and so I listened closely as Amy showed me piles of photographs and talked about her vision for a cookbook that would mix family recipes with stories of survival and rebuilding. It sounded like a great idea, considering how many family recipes were lost in the floodwaters, but after I talked about it with the rest of the Chin Music gang, we decided that we couldn't publish the book because we had committed to Poppas and we didn't have the resources to get two books out by August.

Well, five months later, a big, beautiful cookbook filled with four-color photography arrived at my door. Amy decided that if we couldn't help her, she'd just do it herself. The result is a unique book called Ruby Slippers Cookbook that is one part delicious recipes, another part sumptuous photographs of New Orleans dishes and a third part uplifting stories and photos of Amy's family, friends, neighbors and others surviving and rebuilding after Katrina.

Amy is donating a portion of the proceeds to the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. If you like cookbooks, this is a one-of-a-kind collector's item. For those of you outside of New Orleans, I think the only place to buy the book is at Amy's website.