A year ago, I sat down in the Malaekahana cottage where my husband and I retreat each September and scribbled 10 phrases on a small, yellow lined tablet.

"The Society Years," I wrote. And "Kau Kau Tin and Plate Lunch." And " 'Ahi Goes Uptown."

Though I was on vacation, there was no time to delay: In a flurry of decision-making that August, the newspaper had signed a contract with Island Heritage Publishing to produce a 150th anniversary cookbook. If the book — which would come to be called "The Island Plate" and which is being released to the public this week — was to see the light of day in 2006, production had to begin immediately.

The first step was to show the graphic designers some material that would get their creative juices flowing.

But there was no material. All I had was a vision — a history of Hawai'i's changing food ways, with recipes, as reported in The Advertiser since its founding in 1856 — and several pages of haphazard notes made in a couple of days of random review of microfiche in The Advertiser library.

Those phrases would become the chapter headings of the cookbook and I would have less than six months to surround them with enough material to fill 156 pages.

Over the next seven months — light speed in the publishing world — I would write the book's 10 chapters and test its more than 100 recipes. My husband never knew what he'd find in the kitchen when he came home. Some nights, he'd be made to taste three desserts. On other nights, two entrees and a chow chow pickle!

It amazes me now the gift I was given: Though I learned a very great deal in long days of watching newsprint fly by my eyes on the microfiche reader, those 10 phrases plucked from my fevered brain a year ago survived to the final manuscript only slightly tweaked.

But the greater gift has been the learning.