Tasty Book

Last Christmas, I surprised my family by giving them a cookbook containing some of our most cherished family recipes.  I had originally planned to create a website with all of the recipes, but then I discovered TasteBook.

TasteBook allows you to create a beautiful personalized cookbook, complete with your own pictures for each recipe and a dedication page.  You have the option to add personal notes and introductions to each recipe, which I used to write our memories of each meal.  The quality is amazing – thick pages that I have spilled on multiple times without permanent damage, and a hard cover of your choice.  Cardstock dividers separate the cookbook into categories for easy searching.  You can even order recipe pages after you’ve ordered the cookbook binder, meaning you don’t have to wait until you have enough recipes to fill the cookbook.  Each recipe has a section at the bottom where you can add the contributor.  That way, you never have to wonder if the recipe came from Grandma or Mom.

Armed with a stack of recipes from everyone in the family (I used the excuse that I needed them for the website I wanted to create), I entered 100 of our favorite recipes and a few photos into our own family cookbook.

The fam absolutely loved it.  In fact, the cookbook is proudly displayed in all of their houses (including mine) and I’ve been told that it is the cookbook they use the most.

Luckily, I decided to name the cookbook with a “Volume 1” as a subtitle in case we wanted to keep building the tradition…which we did!

I’m happy to say that Volume 2 is officially underway.  This weekend, my mom gave me another stack of family recipes.  She even included the meal plans she used every week for the family, broken down by day with a grocery list for ingredients.

The cookbooks are so much more than just a collection of recipes.  They contain memories of our childhood that we can pass down to our children one day.  Hopefully because of these cookbooks, we’ll never have to wonder how Grandma made her famous casserole that she never had a recipe for…because now we do.  Plus, it drastically cuts down on the amount of times we have to call Mom for a recipe!