A couple years I took on a huge task of organizing my favorite recipes into my own cookbook. (You can read about the process here.) I gathered our tried and true recipes, loaded them into pages using templates from Blurb, and had the book printed out.
I love this cook book and use it almost every day, and would love to make another if I get the urge. Next time, I will not be so picky about photos-I worked too hard to find just the right photo to put in each section, and in the end, I realize it doesn’t matter. When I open it up (almost every day) to make something, seeing those little faces is all that matters. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times-the days fly by and kids grow so quickly!
It is a special little keepsake and useful just the same.
This is such a lovely family heirloom, I am inspired to make one for our family now with all of our favourites in it! Emma
Every time I see it, I wish I would find the time to make my own!! What a treasure. There is nothing better than successful family meals…makes all the time and work of day in and day out cooking, cleaning up worth it when a child says "oh that's my favorite" or one of their friends saying they hope I make a certain meal they had at our house. Friends of ours get together regularly over the summer and we laugh because all of our kids want us to make the same old favorites while we want to make something new…so we get to experiment with appetizers and side dishes til they become requested too!!
I started to do this, and then stopped. I really need to make one!
That will be an awesome thing to pass down. I make your soft pretzels a lot. My family LOVES them. I'm so glad that you shared it with the rest of us. Hope you have had a good week and hope you have a great weekend.
We made one for my mom with each of her grandchildren's "favorite recipes from grandma". My mom cherishes it and so do all her progeny!
I have this on my list to do. I've posted all my favorite recipes with pictures on my blog so hopefully cutting and pasting will be easy.
After seeing yours a few years ago, I ended up making my sister one for her bridal shower of our family recipes. She loves it and says she uses it more than any other cookbook. I finally made one for myself (3 years later) and LOVE it. 🙂 And I just finished making one for my sister for her bridal shower in August.
I used Shutterfly, and the nice thing about that is that you can duplicate any project and then edit the copy – much easier than starting from scratch each time and then you can change the pictures for the next person. Each of them has been a little different. Oh, and one special thing I did was scan in some handwritten recipes from my Granny and one that my husband had from his grandfather – you can just add the image like a photo! 🙂
So thanks for the idea Sarah! Have a great weekend! 🙂
~Laura
What a wonderful idea! A family treasure and something very useful. I enjoy when you post your weekly menu – gets me inspired and it's always nice to get other ideas. And spur me to get better at meal planning. Great post – hope you're enjoying summer so far!
Thank you everyone! I mentioned that I used Blurb but I think there are so many other ways to do this also-their software was a little intimidating because there were so many choices. I think the Shutterfly idea sounds great Laura-and I also thought another easy way would be to start a free blog (Blogger offers this) and type in the recipes as posts (like I do on my Cooking On Clover Lane blog and then print the blog using Blurb or Lulu or Blog2Print. It's as easy as importing the blog into their site and choosing a few options. I might try that next time, as this first cookbook was a little too time consuming and it's daunting to think of making Volume 2!
You opened up comments!!!! Yay!! I love your family cookbook. I hope to do one for our family someday, with married kids, I will include some of their tried and true favorites, too. I need their help to add to our basic 14 menus;).