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My youngest brother has finally moved out of my parents' home. Just before he moved, I overheard him tell my mom that he was going to have to update his favorite recipes. That gave me an idea for Christmas presents for my entire family.
Our family is very much for saving a bit of family history. How many times have you heard, “I wonder whatever happened to Grandma’s Sugar Cookie recipe?” Well I wanted to make certain that our favorite family recipes were saved for generations to come.
My sister-in-law is famous for having her camera with her at every family function, so I contacted her to be on the lookout for Kodak moments involving a family recipe. For example; barbecues, cookie decorating parties, family dinners and the like. For pennies you can have copies of your pictures made, get enough copies of each picture for the number of cookbooks that you wish to make. Some examples of the pictures in my book are; On the page with my dad’s Famous Barbecued Chicken recipe, we have a picture of him actually cooking the chicken. On the page with my mom’s Sugar Cookie recipe, I have photos of our annual cookie frosting party.
I next contacted all my family members and asked them to email me their favorite recipes. If your family is not online, you can do this by mail or phone. I then collected all the recipes and went to work.
I choose a printing program that I have on my computer, but this can be done on a typewriter or by hand. I copied the recipes, then added some computer graphics. For example on my mom’s Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe, I found a cute graphic of a chocolate chip cookie. I also have a recipe for Toll House Pie, for this recipe I used a graphic of a Hershey Kiss. If you do not have access to computer graphics, try finding pictures in a magazine to cut out and paste on your page. Any recipes that you would have a photo to accompany, you will not need a graphic. Also any recipes that you may have comments about place these somewhere on the page. Such as; “This recipe won a ribbon at the county fair” or “This is one of my daughter’s favorite recipes (the comment on my carrot cake recipe), but she has a tendency to eat the frosting and leave the cake.”
The next step I took was to separate my recipes into categories such as Appetizers, Cookies, Main Dishes and Desserts. You can look at any cookbook to get ideas for your categories. I made an index sheet for each section using the printing program and graphics.
I just made the amount of copies of each page that I needed on my printer, but you can do one page and have copies made on a copy machine. I don’t believe that the cost is much.
Since you don’t want your pages spattered by food while cooking, I choose to enclose each of my pages in a plastic cover. These page covers can be purchased very inexpensively at most department stores, in the stationary section. They are also made to fit a three ring binder, with the holes already in the plastic. Also while you are there, check out the selection of three ring binders. You can choose anything from a cardboard “soft cover” binder, to what I chose, which was a hard cover, three ring binder, with a plastic cover enabling you to slip a title page on the cover. Again, depending on how much money you would like to spend, there are a variety of options available.
Putting your book together is very simple. Get your pages assembled with your recipes, graphics and pictures. Slide your pages into the plastic covers, the covers I use load from the top. I also put pages back to back in the covers, so you are able to get two pages into one plastic cover. Sort according to category and place in the appropriate category. I also made a title and index page. For my title page, I placed our family name, the date the book was made and a the participants names. A brief family tree here would be nice. The index page is a listing of all the recipe categories and the recipes in each. For my cover page, I again used my family name and also a family portrait that we had taken this year, this I slid into the plastic cover on the front of the binder.
These were a big hit with my family for Christmas. Not only did this book include their favorite recipes in one collection, it also contained a bit of family history and memories. It is also very easy to add recipes by just adding more pages to your binder. As a matter of fact, I may give additional pages each year for Christmas, as we find new family favorites.
These books will not only make an excellent Christmas gift, but also for a shower gift for a new member of the family. They are also not very expensive to make, depending on the number of photos and the type of binder used. I hope that you give this idea a try, so your family recipes will be preserved for generations to come.
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