Creating your Own Recipes Family Cookbook
Allow yourself plenty of time to complete the project. Set deadlines and let everyone know what they are. Mine took over a year.
Outline the project. Inform family members of what you are doing and why.
Ask people to submit tips or stories for the recipes they are providing. Sending out a questionnaire will help with the results. Be sure to set a deadline! You’ll see why I put that in bold print if you decide to send one out. I did our book long distance, I lived in Boston and most of my family was in Michigan. Even thought they were told it was for a family cookbook I don’t think most understood the scope of the project I was starting to do. (neither did I) It took over a year to compile and assemble the book. Ours had over 200 pages and more than 50 pages of family history written by my mother.
If you have decided to use the computer to organize your cookbook, here are some tips I learned as I went along. If you are setting your book up in sections, say side dishes, salads, desserts, ect. Set up folders with each category and save the recipe files in the section they belong in. It will save you a lot of time if you are doing a lot of recipes.
Make sure that if you are printing on both sides of the paper you center the recipe on the page with identical side margins. Print a sample as soon as you have 2 recipes done to make sure it is correct.
If you are making an index, be sure to add to it after each recipe is typed. It will make organizing much easier when you are ready to print.
One other thing I did was to print one copy of the cookbook on the paper you are planning to use and had it cut and bound. That way I could see where my mistakes were and correct them. It was also the copy I sent back to my mom for editing because we were doing this cookbook long distance.
Make sure you have a backup of your files if you are doing it with the computer. I used my jump drive.
Leave a Reply