Create cookbooks and get organized! That’s right. You can create cookbooks and de-clutter at the same time!

Somewhere in the back of your mind you know there is a better way to organize all those recipes printed from the internet or clipped from newspaper food sections that you’ve been stashing away. Maybe you have a box full of them in a garage cupboard waiting to be tested, tried and perhaps tossed one day (I admit I still have one out in the garage). Read the rest of this entry »

Cookbook templates are such an easy and fun way to create cookbooks for you, your family and friends, and even for those fundraising projects that inevitably come up.

Using a cookbook template is a tried and true results-getting process steeped in many crafting traditions. For example, sewing hobbyists use patterns. Interior decorators use stencils. Painters and muralists use outlines. So using a cookbook template to automatically format a professional-looking family recipe cookbook makes sense.

Here are 5 ways cookbook templates can help you have more fun making your cookbook: Read the rest of this entry »

When you make your own cookbook, you are all-powerful. You have no one to answer to but yourself. Of course, if you plan to make your own cookbook and give it away, others may offer a few words of “helpful advice.” My answer to them is what my favorite author once said to his critics: “Where were you when the page was blank?”

When you make your own cookbook, you can have high standards. Yours. You have the power to include whatever you wish. Or, not. If you think Aunt Bessie’s lemon pie doesn’t merit a page in your cookbook (because it’s too sweet and the meringue sweats and falls, every time), you don’t have to include it. (If Aunt Bessie wants to make her own cookbook, send her Matilda’s Fantastic Cookbook Software.) Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t you just love to watch those television shows about different people’s lives? By adding biographical stories about relatives to your family recipe cookbook, you can create your own mini-series of sorts using characters from your own family history! Just imagine the amazement of family members when they find out Great Uncle Jack was a circus clown and a cross-dresser!

You probably know that many best-selling biographies (usually of the rich and famous) can span several volumes. In your family recipe cookbook, the biographies will be simple short stories about the people whose recipes are included in your cookbook, or about people in the family who loved the recipes. (Or whomever you want, really.) Read the rest of this entry »

As a child, I would love to read the scrapbook of poems that Aunt Sissy (my father’s sister) created from her poetry column in the local newspaper. Eventually, I came to have the scrapbook, and it brings back fond memories whenever I take a moment to reminisce. It is still one of my prized possessions, and one that I would never give away except to a family member.

Making a family recipe cookbook with my Matilda’s Fantastic Cookbook Software is like digital scrapbooking in many ways. You add stories and photos to your recipes and family biographies. With our new feature of being able to print only one recipe per page, you can get even more creative and customize every page by adding your own special touches. Read the rest of this entry »

Queen Elizabeth’s hats or Paris Hilton’s pooch may be considered “style” by some of the fashionista set. (I won’t venture to comment further, lest the wrath of the Internet come my way.) And, “style” is a word often used in music, film, television, art and literature.

For us family recipe cookbook makers, however, “style” is the consistency of how your family recipe cookbook will appear, particularly how the recipes will appear. Recipe consistency makes your cookbook easier to read and understand. Read the rest of this entry »

There are lots of really good reasons to use Word. Making a family cookbook isn’t one of them. Here’s why:

1. It’s distracting. You will spend more time worrying about formatting your Word document than you will thinking about writing Cousin Dilbert’s Peanut Brittle recipe.

2. You won’t make your cookbook in Word consistently. Sometimes you’ll remember to Bold it. Sometimes you won’t. Sometimes the picture of the recipe is above it. Sometimes below it. With our cookbook software all the consistency is built-in for you. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you looked at your calendar lately?
Where on Earth has this year gone already?

I admit that mentally I am still somewhere in late May. My PDA, however, reminds me daily that we are smack on the verge of August. And that means we are turning the corner on, you guessed it, Christmas! It will be here before you know it.

If you are planning to create a family recipe cookbook as a Christmas gift, then I suggest you consider getting ahead of the game and start working now on putting your family recipe cookbook together using my Matilda’s Fantastic Cookbook Software.

Here is a basic timeline to help you organize your thoughts and activities in time for Christmas:

August
Select your family recipes and type them into the software’s Recipe tab. You may also cut and paste them from other documents or websites. Read the rest of this entry »

One powerful feature in using my cookbook software to preserve family cooking traditions is the ability to standardize family recipes that have been handed down for generations. Standardize the macaroni casserole so beloved by your grandfather? Sacrilege!

Not really. Let me explain.

Standardizing family recipes can be the single most important way to preserve the taste of the dishes over time (aside from creating the actual cookbook, of course). Read the rest of this entry »

Marty in our support bulletin board asked me why he couldn’t get the title “Holiday Cooking” to fit as a recipe heading in his cookbook. It’s normally not a problem, but I explained that this can be an issue in our half page formats if you’re writing a cookbook with a really large font size. There’s just not much space to work with!

But it got me thinking about a bigger issue that applies to everyone writing a family cookbook. When it comes to recipe headings, sometimes less is more.

Obviously, I myself can be a little wordy sometimes. (You never hear about Bill Gates’ Fantastic Word Processing Software. He just calls it “Word.”) But even I can see that when it comes to organizing recipes, short headings make it much easier for cooks to find the right page in your cookbook.

I advised Marty to just call the heading for Holiday Cooking “Holidays.” It’s in a cookbook, so it’s already implied that it’s holiday cooking.

It’s just much easier to skim through a cookbook with headings like “Entrée” and “Dessert” than “Continental Dinner Fare” and “Cakes, Pies and Other Sweets”.

Do I follow my own rule? To be honest, no. But I tend to be a bit quirky about it. Instead of “Salads” I like writing “Green Things.” “Fish” are “Scaly Swimmers.” “Cookies” are “Grandkid Appeasers.”

Is my own cookbook a pain to use for the uninitiated? Undoubtedly. But it’s my cookbook and mostly my recipes. And if you want to use it you’re just going to have to humor my writing.

Matilda

350°F.

Jealous? Asking yourself, “How did she make that tiny little circle next to the F?”

If you have the latest version of our software, you probably know it’s easy to add with the Recipe Builder feature. If not, you can still easily make it. There are two easy ways:

A. Just copy and paste it! Click in front of the °, hold, drag across it, then right click and click “Copy”. Then right click and choose “Paste” wherever you want it to appear.

B. Use the Alt key and number pad to the right of your keyboard. Hold down the Alt key, and hit “0176″ on the number pad. Let go of the Alt key and it’ll appear.

Our software will point you to this page if you want this symbol or others.

I’m not a big fan of hosting my personal family recipes on a website. There are a number of pitfalls in putting hundreds of hours into maintaining an online recipe book:

1. Will they be around?
What happens if the website service goes bankrupt? Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but maybe next year.

2. What do you do if the recipes vanish?
Is there a backup? I’ve heard several stories of people entering all their recipes online and they just vanish. *poof*

3. What if they become obnoxious?
It may be free now, but what about three years from now? Five? Ten? What if they suddenly start flooding you with advertisements? If you build up a huge collection of recipes online, it’ll be really hard to just walk away.

4. How likely is it that you’ll share your family recipes with your grand daughter if it’s a bookmark on some web page?
Sitting in front of a computer, even online, is an inherently isolating event. Handing somebody a printed cookbook is inherently social.
Imagine you just died. (I know it’s horrible, but play along.) Are your descendants likely to stumble into your family recipes at website XYZ under the user name GrannyCookMachine537?

5. Are you comfortable with not having control over how your family recipes will be used?
If you carefully read the license agreements to these online recipe websites, you’ll notice that even though you own the recipes, they have publishing rights. They can make their own recipe book using your recipes and not pay you a dime. Melissa A. Trainer writes about this issue here.

6. Who wants to look up a recipe on a computer when your hands are covered in butter and eggs?
I’ll start making the pot roast as soon as my computer boots up. And my internet access starts. And I log on to the website. And I do a search for the recipe I want. And I do the search again because I typed it wrong. And–oh heck, let’s just order a pizza.

As Napoleon Dynamite’s brother said, “Yes, I love technology.” But not so much that I don’t see the value of a good ol’ fashioned printed cookbook. Obviously, as the owner of a cookbook printing software company, I’m pretty biased. But I could’ve just as easily started an online recipe storage website like all the others. I didn’t.

That’s because I believe the best way to manage your family recipes is from your own computer. Off line and in control.

For more about my cookbook printing software, click here.

Ruth looked distressed. “Do you think Arnie should be in my cookbook?”

Arnie was her poodle. He passed on to the Great Fire Hydrant In The Sky last year.

“I should hope not,” I said. “He’d be much too stringy even to slow cook with by now.”

She scowled. “No. I mean in my Family Tree section. Should Arnie be in the Family Tree section of my family cookbook? Is that weird?”

“Let’s put it in perspective,” I replied. “Your cousin Graham. He borrowed $800 from you six years ago. Never repaid it. He hogged down half your peach cobbler last Christmas. He hasn’t said five civil words to you in half a decade. Is he going to be in your cookbook?”

“Yes.”

“Is he more family to you than Arnie?”

She smiled.

“Family,” I said, “has little to do with time or life or death or even species. Family is love, and family is forever.”

“Hmmmm. Maybe,” she said. “Now I wonder if there’s some form of slow cooking I could do to Graham that would get my $800 back….”

There are many reasons to make a cookbook (church, business, etc), but this story focuses on ideas for family cookbooks.

Maybe you buy my fine software. Maybe you go it alone using Microsoft Word. Or maybe (heaven forbid) you go with one of those scoundrel competitors. Whichever you do, let’s be clear on one thing: You are a saint.

Really.

It was your idea to put together a document of the most precious things you give to your most precious people–the food you feed your family. Someday you’ll be dead and everyone will be very grateful. For the coobook you left them, that is. Not that you’re dead.

But I’m afraid, my poor dears, you are going to screw it up along the way.

Can’t be helped. Nobody every published anything perfectly the first time, and if it’s your first crack at it that’ll be especially true. The following tips won’t prevent all the mistakes, but they’ll at least clear the way for some new ways to goof. Alas, life is about learning.

Mistake #1. Making the One Final Perfect Family Cookbook.

Oh, I see it all the time. You spend hundreds of hours pouring over every recipe, quibbling over every detail. You go with one of these big Vanity printing presses that charge you thousands of dollars to get them printed. You proudly hand them to every family member. And have no idea why they get buried at the bottom of a cupboard.

Why? Because there’s no such thing as The One Final Perfect Family Cookbook. There are ALWAYS new ideas and new recipes to add. There are always little typos you missed along the way. And even if there weren’t, what does that tell the rest of your family when you foist on them a giant tome? “It’s not yours.” That’s what.

Go with a lower budget! Give everyone a cheaper book and say, “Mark it up and return it to me next Christmas!” Make your Family Cookbook a living, breathing document that gets added to every year, not just by you but by everyone. It won’t get buried in the cupboard, dear, if it belongs to everybody.

Mistake #2. Making the Family Recipe Book About Recipes

Last Christmas did you run into the house, tear open the presents and leave without talking to anyone? I certainly hope not. The holidays are the one chance to see everybody. Even the smelly ones are nice for a little while.

Building a family recipe book with just recipes is like ripping open presents and running out the door. Stay a while. Put some photos in there of big events. Write some scuttlebutt. (Nothing too scandalous!) Throw in an address book and birthday calendar if you want. (My software helps you do that, at the risk of tooting my own horn.) The point is to make it a family recipe book and a family year book. Will Great Uncle Larry really care about your new peanut brittle recipe? Probably not. But he’ll take a look at it if it’s got a photo of him at third base seats in Shea Stadium.

The idea of Christmas isn’t the presents. The idea of a recipe book isn’t food. It’s feeding people you love. Let your book reflect that by involving people in the book.

Mistake #3. Bad Proof Reading.

If you are writing your family cookbook, you are going to be a lousy editor. Even if you are a good editor most of the time, you will disappoint yourself with what you missed. Get two or three people to help you.

I always tell my proof readers there’s a Waldo on every page. As in “Where’s Waldo.” The Waldo is a mistake that I know about. “If you are half as clever as you think you are,” I say, “you’ll see it.” Sometimes there isn’t a Waldo, but more often than not the proof reader will find it anyway.

That’s all the mistakes I can think of for now. I suspect I’ll be adding to this as I continue to make more. The most important thing to remember about your cookbook, and life, is that the mistakes mostly don’t really matter. If you’ve shown people you love them and you pass on a little knowledge, the hiccups along the way tend to sort themselves out.

If you are interested in some really great cookbook software, come check it out at CookbookPeople.com.