A business is born. On my kitchen table.

I was 37 years old and I had never published a book in my life. Or owned a business, for that matter. But all that soon changed.

At first, I worked alone. I called my new company, Quail Ridge Press, named after the street I lived on at the time. After The Twelve Days of Christmas Cookbook was published, a lot of my friends and family members started asking me to recommend cookbooks. That's when Barney had the idea. "You ought to do a book on the best of the best cookbooks," he said.

(See my first "Best of" cookbook)

So I started gathering up all my favorite local cookbooks and put together the Best of the Best from Mississippi Cookbook. We printed 4,000 copies of it.

It sold out in three weeks. That was 1982 and we knew we were on to something.

~Gwen