Recipes of Trailside Cafe and Tea Room

NEW! EXPANDED SECOND EDITION! Over 200 recipes for easy, down home food.

Serving everything from Hummus Pita to Crusty Peach Cobbler, Trailside Café and Tea Room became a favorite destination for the few years of its existence. Plate lunches of Pot Roast or Ribs ‘n’ Kraut became overnight hits. Patrons demanded recipes! At the close of the restaurant in December 2011, the first edition of the cookbook sold out three printings.

Now with a new section on Sandwiches, and a greatly expanded last chapter including many more family recipes sure to be a hit in anyone’s kitchen, Recipes of Trailside Café and Tea Room offers the ‘how-to’ for delicious Appetizers, hearty soups like Split Pea or Potato Leek, fresh salads including Wilted Lettuce, and scrumptious desserts like Lime Pie and Apricot Fried Pies. While some of the recipes like Fried Potatoes are familiar regulars for most cooks, many others utilize unexpected ingredients (Persimmon Cake!) or combinations (Skillet Dinner for One).

In a family-based introduction, author Denele Campbell recounts the life journey of her recipes, from Depression-era basics to the buffet at the officer’s club, and gives a brief history of what led her to open the café. She may have marked that project off her bucket list, but the flavor of its food lingers.

Non-fiction. Available as e-book or paperback at Amazon or your favorite book retailer.  (Paperback version recommended for layout coherence.)

5 stars!   “I LOVE LOVE LOVE this book! I received a copy for my birthday this year, and have already made several recipes. I have a family of four and enjoy cooking healthy and hearty meals at home. Meals also have to taste good around our house with a picky toddler. These recipes are delicious and also nutritious. I look forward to cooking dinner again and again using this book as my sidekick.” K F Dickson

Shayla Williams rated it 5 of 5 stars “Simple recipes that anyone can follow, this is a good cookbook for a beginner’s kitchen. Almost all of the ingredients used are already sitting in your pantry. If you are one of many people who have dreamed about opening a restaurant, you might like the autobiographical portions as well.”  Won as a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.”

5 stars! “Written with such open honesty. The stories are as good as the recipes. Loved all of it! Wish the business had succeeded!”

Reviewed by Katelyn Hensel for Readers’ Favorite: 4 of 5 stars!  “Recipes of Trailside Cafe and Tea Room is a very tasty mouthful of recipes and stories from the past. Dishes run the traditional gamut from appetizers to dinner to desserts…This is the new revised edition and contains more than 200 recipes. I loved the pictures included in the beginning, and felt like they really improved the appearance and format of the book. I really felt like I was able to see the history of the cafe and tearoom, and feel the atmosphere that surrounds these recipes. My favorite grouping of recipes was the “Family Traditions” section. While the history of the author’s family and nutrition was very interesting, I feel that I may be hesitant to try anything with bone meal or nutritional yeast in it…though more so with the bone meal. Denele Campbell writes a mean recipe book, and if her cooking is anything as good as the recipes describe, you can bet these dishes will satisfy!”