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EDEN — When Lisa Shively set out to write her first cookbook in 2001, she had no idea her little project was going to be a recipe for success, catapulting her to the national food scene.

Ten years later, she has her own company: Lisa Shively’s Kitchen Helpers, in addition to eight cookbooks, a line of 12 Quick Meal Mixes, an assortment of mixes in a line she calls Serious Seasonings, a group of soup mixes and another of hot chocolates.

She’s currently negotiating with national retail chains who want to carry some of those products.

And, somewhere along the way, she became the host of the Southern Women’s Show’s celebrity cooking stage in places like Orlando, Birmingham, Charlotte and Raleigh. Once a year, she hosts at the International Women’s Show in Detroit.

Those are four-day gigs, in which she introduces other cooks and chefs and takes her own turn on stage, usually demonstrating something from her line, Kitchen Helpers.

It’s far more than she envisioned in 2001 when she thought selling her cookbook might allow her to stay home with her two children.

That winter, Mother Nature slammed the region with one winter storm after another. Snowed in for three weeks, Shively had time to organize recipes.

She says it was her background in chemistry that gave her the edge in formulating those recipes, some of which came from her 92-year-old grandmother, whom Shively calls a “some-of-this, some-of-that cook.”

A medical technologist by trade, Shively says she leaves nothing to chance.

“Because of my background in chemistry, I weigh, measure and time everything,” says Shively. When the wintry spell ended, Shively had the basis for her first cookbook, “From Our Home to Yours.”

She knew she had to reach beyond the Rockingham County market to be successful with the book.

In 2004, she signed on to be an exhibitor at the Southern Women’s Show in Raleigh.

That’s where a little luck crossed her path.

One of the cooking demonstrators cancelled, and Shively was asked if she’d like to fill the one-hour slot on the stage, cooking in front of around 100 people.

“I was horrible,” recalls Shively, who tried to make a complicated salmon dish and wrote every word she planned to speak.

She ditched that delivery and started winging it.  Her down-home style and easy banter with the audience soon made her a favorite. When she forgot an ingredient and had to send a well-known chef to retrieve it from her booth, she didn’t lose a beat when he came back empty-handed.

“Never send a chef to do a cook’s job,” she quipped to the audience.

Asked if she gets nervous in front of strangers, she has a line waiting: “No, because if I’m feeding you, you’re either friend or family ’cause I don’t feed strangers.”

Soon she was on cooking demonstration lineups with folks like Paula Deen, Sandra Lee and Ruby Ann Boxcar, the comedian, cook and cookbook author.

It was no surprise that show organizers offered her the role of host, keeping her on stage the entire day.

She coaxed people to remember her name: “Shively, like lively,” she’d say. It prompted one television reporter to dub her “Lively Lisa Shively.”

The name fits.

Between demonstrations, or when she’s taking her turn on stage, she tells the audience jokes and plays games that she made up like “The Spice is Right” and “Let’s Bake a Deal.”

Between shows, Shively has written more cookbooks, which have been reprinted numerous times.

But, from those people attending her shows, she learned that they wanted more than recipes. “They wanted quicker and easier,” she says.

So in 2008, she came out with Quick Meal Mixes. In a rental house that she and her husband, David, own in the Draper community of Eden, she created a commercial kitchen and started mixing up seasonings and packaging them in envelopes printed with illustrations she designed herself.

Of the 12, the Cajun chicken and the chili mix are her favorites.

“The Cajun chicken mix,” she reminisces. “That’s when I knew I was onto something, and I needed to run with it.”

A logical next step was to connect with the gift basket market at the National Gift Basket conventions. More shows, more travel, and the mom, whose goal was to stay home with her sons, is now loading her mini-van and heading off for places like Washington to the International Fancy Food Show, or Columbus, Ohio, to the National Gift Basket Convention. It’s helped her create products that the market will support.

For Father’s Day, she created Serious Seasonings, giving each a name that includes a tool, like “Hammer-Slamming Barbecue Ribs,” and “Chisel-Chip Onion Dip.” They’re perfect gifts to put in a gift basket for a man.

When she started getting requests for soup and hot chocolate mixes, she whipped up a line of each and packaged them in cute envelopes.

Now, with a deal from a national chain looming, she’s ready to take the business to the next level. The retailer, which she’s keeping confidential during negotiations, is talking about wholesale orders in the tens of thousands, she says.

Shively is working with a business in Raleigh to package and ship her products, although she’ll still mix them in her Eden kitchen, put the contents in drums and haul those to the packer in her mini-van.

It’s a lot for an Eden gal to take in, but she’s ready for the business to grow.

“I don’t even know my job title anymore,” she says. “I’m still a one-person operation, but I’ve gotten used to saying ‘we’ so they won’t think it’s just me,” she says.

But she’s ready for what lies ahead.

“I guess I’ll have to play with the big boys now,” she says.

“And I’m ready to play!”

Contact Myla Barnhardt at 627-4881, Ext. 116, or myla.barnhardt@news-record.com