Marg Ruttan

Marg Ruttan has always wanted to be able to draw and create beautiful

art. However, she lacks depth perception so drawing is challenging to

say the least. She was thrilled when she discovered that she could

create

pictures using her computer and Photoshop. It is because of this

program that she is now realizing a life-long dream: to be able to

create pictures and art work that she deems beautiful and fun.

Marg has spent hours and hours working on the pictures in her coloring

books and it is her hope that those who purchase her books will get

hours of coloring enjoyment from them. Marg continues to create new

coloring books

as she enjoys the art of coloring. She loved to color as a child and

that love is still with her today. Marg remembers a time when she was

first introduced to colored pencils. She had never owned any and when

she was

around 9 years old some friends brought some to her house so they

could color together. She was in awe of those colored pencils. They

were so much more refined than crayons. She was amazed and thrilled

with them. And

her favorite medium to color with today remains colored pencils. She

has also recently taken up coloring digitally in Photoshop and is

enjoying it. This has added a whole new experience to explore and

enjoy.

In addition to creating coloring books, Marg has written cookbooks for

years. The information below relates to this part of her writing life.

Marg Ruttan was born into a family of cooks and she seems to have

learned to cook by osmosis. Mind you, her cooking skills often came at

the expense of initial failures!

The first time Marg made shortbreads they turned out to be like hockey

pucks! Her brave hubby, Fred, used to take them to work and dunk them

in his coffee to soften them up. One of his buddies commented,

"Those cookies are so hard we could throw them at the cement wall and

they wouldn't break". Needless to say, Marg was mortified. However,

she's made thousands of shortbread since that time and they have

gotten

rave reviews.

Another of Marg's early adventures in cooking involved apple pie. Marg

and Fred were having friends for supper and she baked an apple pie.

Everything was going well until she went to serve the pie. Once on the

plate,

the pie looked rather flat and her guest commented "Guess we're having

economical pie tonight!". Marg quickly learned that you have to heap

the apples up inside the pie crust to get enough to make a really good

pie.

However, all was not totally lost, the pastry was excellent!

Through these types of trial and error adventures Marg realized that

recipes need to be simple and uncomplicated. They need to be easy to

read and follow and on top of that they need to be fairly quick to

make.

Thus, she began collecting, creating and compiling recipes. As a young

woman, Marg wrote a cooking column for her daily newspaper for several

years. Then when she moved West she again wrote a cooking column for

some

time. In 1992 she published her first cookbook, "Traditions of Home

Cookies and Muffins" and in 1993 she published her second cookbook,

"Traditions of Home Casseroles Soups and More". Both became

best-sellers and were

also published by a French publisher and distributed in Quebec, Canada

and the French speaking parts of Europe and Africa.

Due to some fairly major health challenges, Marg allowed those two

cookbooks to go out of print. However, with her health restored and

coming up on the 30th anniversary of her first successful book, she

has once again

ventured into the cookbook publishing world. Much has changed in those

30 intervening years and it's now possible to create a cookbook

without need of paper and large investments in thousands of copies of

any one book.

That has provided the opportunity to create cookbooks that are much

more reasonably priced and Marg is happy to pass those savings on to

her readers.

Marg's cooking heritage goes back several generations. Her maternal

grandmother, Maggie Jane, left her home town of Gaspe, Quebec and

traveled to Schenectady, New York in the late 1800s to be with her

sister-in-law

who was expecting a baby. She helped the doctor deliver that child and

cared for it and her sister-in-law for several weeks. The doctor she

had assisted got to know her and discovered her love of cooking. He

offered

her the opportunity to become an apprentice chef at the Van Wyck

Hotel, which she promptly accepted. Some time after her apprenticeship

was completed Maggie went back to Gaspe where she cooked in a lumber

camp for years.

Two of her sons became cooks and one of her daughters, Marg's mother,

also became a cook, working at a hospital, a naval base and a

children's home in that capacity.

On her Dad's side of the family, Marg's paternal great grandfather was

a cook. He had nine boys, including her grandfather. As was the custom

of those times, he taught all his boys to cook. Several of them became

cooks

and many of the next generation also became cooks. And several in

Marg's own generation and the generations that followed also were and

are involved in the food industry.

GGood family fare with its comforting flavors and fragrances is the

focus of Marg's culinary artistry. Over the years she has adapted,

invented and collected recipes that are true flavor feasts. She has

now compiled

these recipes into a series of cookbooks that you will find

indispensible in your kitchen. With her own grandmother, her Mom, who

was grandma to her children, and now herself being a grandma, Marg

wanted to focus her

recipes on the women in her family who brought good food to the table,

thus the series of "Grandma's Best" cookbooks has been born. You'll

want to be sure to check out all her cookbooks and you may well find

it

difficult to decide which one you like best!