Make Your Own Cookbook – Things to Consider

If you make your own cookbook you can help with a common issue that may be found in homes everywhere.

Most people have recipes they have collected for years. They may be hand written or cut out from newspapers or magazines. The recipes are usually intended to be used regularly but aren’t. They are put into boxes or folders and put aside. And therein lies the problem.

When they are wanted they can never be found or they take too long to find. This takes away from the joy of trying out something different of having a favourite dish. It may even mean not having that recipe again. Other problems arise from spilling substances on loose pages or losing the recipes altogether. As the number of pages and cuttings rises it can be overpowering and people give up looking any more.

Something can be done. You can make your own cookbook. Here are a few things to think about if this is an option.

First, you need to gather all the recipes together. Get them out of storage or wherever you have them. This may also be a good time to sort through them and consider which ones you actually want to keep. There may be some that are no longer what you like or there may be some that weren’t actually your favourites anyway.

You can then use a word processor on a computer or a recipe template in some kind of software to type up the recipes. There will also be templates available online and online systems that allow you to make up recipe pages.This is the part that will take a little time but it has to be done to get the finish you are looking for.

You will also need to organise the recipes when you make your own cookbook. Consider how they should be grouped and what will be the easiest way to find them in the cookbook. This could be by type of food; meat, vegetables etc. or it could be by type of meal; dinner, breakfast, brunch etc. It is not really important what it is so long as there is a way to organise them and you understand where to look when using the cookbook.

Once this has been decided then you can look for a way to separate the sections. There is a variety of dividers available to do this and they could be colour coded or labelled or even have pictures. Again, it doesn’t matter as long as you like it.

It can be a good idea to have an index or a table of contents as well. Particularly if the number of recipes is growing as you go. There are ways to do this with most word processing software.

Another thing to remember to do is check all the spelling, formatting and layout of the pages. It can be surprising what you find as you read through checking the details of what you have written.

Lastly, you need to find a way to keep it all together. This might be with a ringbinder or a folder or even using a binding system. You should consider what suits best and perhaps something you have used previously.

Also, consider that if you have a large number of recipes then you could make more than one cookbook. They could have a separate theme for each; a book of dessert recipes for example. This will help make it easier to find recipes when you need them.

A final thought if you make your own cookbook is that you may like to allow for adding recipes at a later date. Therefore you might want to think about using a method that allows you to add pages to the cookbook after you have put the book together. This would be a method that allows you to type up new pages and add them to the existing book.

If you want to make your own cookbook  it can be easily done. You can get more information on how it can be done by having a look at www.make-a-cookbook.com

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