Create a Family Recipe Book

some I have collected myself and are family favorites
a I have even made up, I love to cook
but most are family recipes.
I have a shoebox full of hand written, food stained recipes that have been given to me over the years. Sister, Aunts, Cousins, My Mothers, Grandmums, and even a few from my Great Grandmum.

The question is, what do I do with all these? My sis said I should put them all on a disk, but somehow that just doesn’t seem right. The little “make your own recipe books” that I have seen don’t look big enough, although I could have book 1 and book 2, maybe even 3 :P

I need to decide to do something before I lose all these little pieces of paper.

This goal showed up in my Magic 8 ball, and I said, “Oh my! I’m already doing this!” So, I’ll add it here with the understanding that I likely won’t do much with it again until winter comes back. Too much computer time for summer!

taking me a while to do this. why? procrastination is my worse enemy. I will make a list of those recipes today I promise. For now that will be my small goal. I need cheering up this not to mention a hug. haha!!

Mum has a big binder of newspaper clippings, scribbled notes and torn pages from magazines. This will be the basis of our Family Recipe Book. Family consists of her, myself and a bunch of relatives in England that I haven’t seen since I was three. But, no matter .. it’s important to me to have her banana bread recipe, my borscht, and her black forest torte written down in a safe place.

For the first time since completing my recipe book, I used it and made muffins.

They tured out yummy and the book held up.

done. I’m up to date. I don’t have anymore Recipes to add to the book right now.

I’ll just have to keep it updated, that’s all.

working on this again this week.

I found a bunch of recipes and I’m getting some page protectors into a binder.

Then I’m just going to organize them by ABC.

I started last year adding two pages per month. This years’ goal is to add three per month-some of those not necessarily being recipes, maybe fun trivia or some interesting tidbit.
Speaking of, I need to add the three pages per month to my list :0)

Without 43 Things, I’d still be “wanting” to do this but doing nothing about it. Well NOW, I’ve started doing something about it. There are several steps in this plan, the first being I need to organize what I’ve got!

This long weekend, I found a cool stripey binder sort of like this one. I got all my scattered recipe printouts into the binder, marked the “good” ones so I know for sure which recipes I’ve tried, and replaced my TWO old awful recipe boxes with ONE beautiful Mary Englebrecht large box. I also started sorting through my clipped recipes and was ruthless in discarding recipes that would no longer suit us – too much fat, too complicated, too many strange ingredients, etc. I recopied some recipes that I love onto new big beautiful cards.

As soon as I make my way through the entire pile of clipped recipes, the next step will be to transfer recipes that are on old small or dirty cards onto new large clean cards. I’m even considering getting a small laminating machine so I can laminate the cards and make them spill/spatter-proof!

Next, I will tackle the dreaded “small recipe booklets” that I have collected over the years. I may dismantle them and salvage only the best recipes if there are just a few decent ones. Or, if I am going to save the whole book, I’ll stack them together and go to Kinkos to have punch-hole bindings put on them so they are all together unified as their own recipe book. :)

I will end up with two definitive personal recipe sources – my binder and my box – and organize/narrow my cookbooks down to fit into one cabinet. Then it’s on to the “family” part of this recipe madness!

I’ve been thinking about this for some time actually, so I’m glad I found it on someone else’s list. In 2008 I’m going to make this happen!