My New Cookbook

I love to cook and years ago I decided to make my own cookbook of all my favorite recipes. I used an old journal that I had lying around and wrote in the recipes, a little note, the date (like a journal entry!), and ideas for variations.

The book was handy but it was so big and bulky, had so many empty pages, and couldn't be easily edited that I decided to make a new one. I copied out all the recipes into a Word document and then gave my original cookbook to my little sister.

I was originally thinking that I would get a small 3-ring binder and get some page protectors with photo sized slots. But that didn't work so well when I realized that finding page protectors to fit in small ring binders is actually really hard. I didn't want a full sized ring binder because part of my problem with the first cookbook was how big it was.

In the end, I bought a plastic photo album from Target for about $2 and some blank recipe cards and 4x6 scrapbook paper from Hobby Lobby for about $10. I formatted the recipes in Word to fit the recipe cards and printed them all out, some of them on the recipe cards and some of them on the scrapbook paper.

The end result is way more functional and pretty good for someone with zero skills. The text color that I picked out in Word was a bright fuchsia color but it printed out as your standard red color. It was disappointing but I will survive. Some of the recipes on the scrapbook paper are kind of hard to read and a lot of the text is crooked because my printer had a hard time catching the 4x6 cards. I had to print on the fronts and the backs of most of the cards so that will mean taking them in and out of the photo album in order to use them which kind of defeats the purpose and maybe 11x8.5 is the only way to go and I just need more counter space.

I think that when I run out of space in this little album I may try and go back to the binder idea or maybe an actual recipe box. Jim says I should just store my recipes digitally but I can't get used to that. And I am sure my iPad would get damaged spending so much time on the kitchen counter while I cook.

I am pleased with my little cookbook and definitely excited to be able to use it more now that it is functional. Until next time, crafty peeps. Over and out.