Weekday Weekend Cookbook Anniversary! (+Giveaway) (CLOSED)

This week marks the one-year anniversary of our cookbook, Weekday Weekend. And we are gonna celebrate all week long with a bunch of really good giveaways, most of them on Instagram, so be sure to follow us there if you don’t already. We are also offering a 24-hour FLASH SALE if you want to buy our cookbook directly from us, just use the code cookbook10 and you can snag a copy for just $10 + shipping.

We are so immensely proud of this book, but we realize it’s possible some of you may not really know what this oddly named cookbook is all about. The title Weekday Weekend comes from the book’s challenge, which in a nutshell, is to eat well during the week so you can kick back and enjoy a treat on the weekend. It’s exactly how Elsie and I really do eat, and so it was an important theme that we wanted to express in this book. But if you don’t care about the challenge then just know that this is a cookbook filled with easy to make recipes and a good mix of healthy and indulgent things to try. Yum!

What kind of recipes can you expect? That’s probably the number one question I’ve gotten this year. I think everyone wants to know if it’s just pretty “blogger food” or if there are going to be actual recipes you’ll want to make for breakfast or dinner in the book. I get it! I buy a LOT of cookbooks myself so I completely understand wanting one that will be useful as well as pretty. And I’d like to think that is exactly what Elsie and were aiming for.

Here are a few of the weekday (healthy) recipes you can expect. We have lots of breakfasts, sandwiches, salads, and dinner recipes in the book as well as some healthy snacks and desserts. I would say the majority of the recipes are fairly quick and easy to make; you don’t have to be an expert-level chef to pull these together. We wanted to share recipes that people would actually want to eat and also be able to make over and over again for themselves and their family. I personally make the granola recipe in the book ALL THE TIME. And I’ve heard from more than one reader that the zoodles and noodles stir fry is one they make often. Which always makes me so proud to hear!

The weekend recipes (more indulgent, not necessarily healthy) are a lot of fun! We’ve got quite a few breakfast/brunch recipes, some favorite cheat meals (hello, pizza!), cocktails, and desserts. There’s something for everyone in this cookbook!

We also worked with two dietitians who contributed heavily to this cookbook. You might already know Lindsey and Sarah from their Ask a Dietitian series we’ve been featuring on the blog this past year. It was important to us that we didn’t just say the cookbook or the challenge it presents was healthy—we wanted it to actually be true! Imagine that. And we also wanted to offer our readers even more information that could benefit them as they seek balance and health in their lives. That’s also why we decided to continue to work with them for this past year to offer the Ask a Dietitian series, because we want to offer all our readers more tools and information that may help. We are not health experts, but still very much learning and growing ourselves. And while we love a cocktail, cookie, or even a bag of chips, we also didn’t want to paint a picture that eating “treats” all the time was sustainable. We wanted to present something that was REAL. I hope that has come across in this cookbook.

Here’s my favorite behind-the-scenes moment from working on the book with Elsie. For us, we wrote the entire book and had it recipe tested first. Then we shot all the photos. Elsie had recently moved to Nashville, so I drove there for two weeks to shoot the book together, mostly in her sunroom.

We had this vision for a lay down photo that showed off a bunch of different infused waters for one of the weekday (healthy) chapters. So we got a plastic drop cloth and poured a bunch of bags of chipped ice (from Sonic) on it and then added our infused water jars we had prepared. The photo turned our really beautiful IMHO, but as you can see the process was … messy.

It was A BEAUTIFUL MESS you could say! (We don’t do puns about our blog name enough.)

Thank you to all our friends who have supported our cookbook this year! We’ve had so many people offer giveaways, reviews, and promote the book to their audiences and it seriously means the world to us! Recently, Natalie made our Watermelon Mojito recipe from the book and I think hers turned out so pretty we should have just hired her to do all the photos for our book. #regrets

And to all of you who have bought the book, cooked our recipes, and shared it online or in real life with friends, THANK YOU! Writing a cookbook was a dream of mine for many years and seeing my book out there with people making stuff from it kind of makes me want to cry (happy tears, not sad) every time I see it. Which is probably totally dorky but I don’t care! Thank you for checking out our cookbook and for your support of our blog.

If you want to leave us a review on Amazon, it honestly means a LOT. No pressure, but it’s much appreciated if you have a few minutes.

And if you haven’t bought our cookbook yet, I mean, are we even friends? Just kidding, we’re totally friends. You don’t have to buy anything from me to be my friend. But if you are interested in the book, did you hear you can get it today for only $10 on our site? Or if you have Prime, it may be a similar price on Amazon or at least fairly close. And if you hate cooking, no worries! But I’ll just point out that since the book is full of both healthy and indulgent meals, snacks, drinks, desserts—it’s pretty easy to love and would make a great gift. Is it too soon to mention holiday shopping? Oh, it is? OK, forget I said anything then.

(Whispers … but the holidays ARE coming … so …)

I wasn’t lying about a giveaway, we actually do have one for you now to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Weekday Weekend. We decided to create a meal planner notepad to go along with the challenge of the cookbook to help those who want to map out and shop for their week to stay on track. So we are giving away our cookbook and the meal planner to THREE lucky winners, just check the details below. xo. Emma (+Elsie)

Weekday Weekend + Meal Planner Giveaway