The Family Cookbook Project

Month: November 2022

  • Today Is The Christmas Print Deadline

    Today Is The Christmas Print Deadline

    Today is the order deadline if you are planning on having your cookbook printed and shipped in time for holiday gift giving.

    If you place your paid order by the end of the day today, November 30th, you will receive your printed cookbooks before Christmas.

    Orders are processed on a first come, first served basis, so don’t wait until the last minute. Get your print orders in as soon as possible and receive your cookbooks even sooner!

    There will be an extended deadline, but expedited shipping will be required.

  • The Best Christmas Cookie Recipes Can Be Frozen

    The Best Christmas Cookie Recipes Can Be Frozen

    In our house, there is nothing like a warm, soft cookie right out of the oven. However since it is not practical to make dough for only a few cookies at a time, the next best thing is to freeze your cookie dough and pull out enough cookies for your immediate needs.

    Freezing cookies also provides time saving opportunities when you want to get ready for a holiday cookie swap in October or getting ready for a school bake sale anytime.

    How you best freeze cookies depends on what type of cookie you are making. The Family Cookbook Project has collected thousands of cookie recipes if you need a suggestion.

    Cookies like chocolate chip and oatmeal-raisin freeze best if you make the actual cookie beforehand. Scoop out the dough just as if you were about to bake it and place it on a baking sheet lined with parchment or a Silpat (they can be close, but not touching). Instead of putting it into the oven, put them into the freezer for at least 6 hours instead. Once frozen, the dough balls get sealed inside a plastic freezer bag and when it is time to bake, you are ready to go.

    Cookies like shortbread or sandies, or any smooth slice-and-bake cookies can be pressed into logs, wrapped in wax paper and frozen solid. Prepare the dough as usual, then shape it into one or two logs that can be covered with wax paper and placed in a plastic freezer bag. When you’re ready to bake, let them warm on the counter for 10 to 15 minutes before slicing. You might also want to let the logs thaw in the fridge for a few hours before you’re ready to use the dough. Slice the cookies into thick disks and you’re ready to put them in the oven as usual.

    The third type of cookies that can be frozen are cut-out cookies, like sugar cookies and many holiday cookies. The dough for these cookies can be frozen in disks and then stacked together with wax paper between them. When ready to bake, thaw until bendable and continue with the recipe.

    Most frozen cookies will need an extra minute or two in the oven. Otherwise, prepping and baking the cookies is exactly the same as in the recipe.

     

    Bill Rice is Founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook (Available on Amazon), both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing and is an avid genealogist tracing his family back to the 1600’s.

    Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest!

  • 5 Ways To Improve Your Family Cookbook Over The Holidays

    5 Ways To Improve Your Family Cookbook Over The Holidays

    The holidays are a time when we get all of our family together and celebrate together with food, fun and festivities. It is also a great time to motivate others in the family to contribute to your family cookbook project.
    Here are some ideas to help you improve your cookbook during the holidays:

    1)        When you see family members, remember to talk about the cookbook and how excited you are as it moves forward. Others will see your enthusiasm and be more willing to help contribute. event
    2)    When someone brings a delicious dish to a family gathering – ask for the recipe. People are often proud of their food creations and love to share recipes. If they don’t have it with them, let them know contributing recipes is easy on FamilyCookbookProject.com. Encourage them to give it a try.
    3)    Take photos of all the great food being shared. Photos of dishes really bring recipes to life. Photos can be easily added to your recipes on FamilyCookbookProject.com and can or do not have to be included in the printed version.
    4)    Ask for suggestions for the cookbook cover and recipe layout design. FamilyCookbookProject.com currently has many professionally designed cookbook covers to choose from including your own custom cover – with more on the way. It also allows you to select from a host of different recipe layout options. Print a hardcopy of several of the designs and ask family members what they think. Not only will the choice be easier to make with feedback, but you will get them more interested in contributing to the cookbook.
    5)    Use the index to show family members the recipes in the cookbook. If you’re close to having your cookbook completed, bring the cookbook’s index and a cover page printed from your printer to family holiday events. Show it around and let people see who and what has been submitted already. Maybe they will see a recipe that is missing and want to contribute or maybe they will place an advance order for the final edition.
    With so much time spent in the kitchen around the holidays, it’s no wonder that cooking and recipes and cookbooks and food are talked about constantly as everyone pitches in to prepare our holiday get together. Creating your family cookbook will become a valuable resource for generations to come.

    Happy Thanksgiving from The Great Family Cookbook Project!

     

     

    Bill Rice is Founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook (Available on Amazon), both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing and is an avid genealogist tracing his family back to the 1600’s.

    Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest!

  • Grandma’s Recipes Preserved – 1,000 and Counting!

    Grandma’s Recipes Preserved – 1,000 and Counting!

    They go by many names – Grandma, Nonna, Oma, Granny, and Gram to name a few.

    Their cooking influenced not only what we ate, but what the entire family enjoyed.

    Our Family Cookbook Editors have preserved some of their grandmother’s recipes so that they can be passed down to future generations and help their memories live on forever.

    Here are over 1,000 recipes From our grandmothers for you to enjoy.

     

    Be sure to check out  Granny Peatie’s Scottish Shortbread

    This is a recipe I found in my own Gram Helen’s recipe box from her husband’s grandmother in St Andrews, Scotland back in the late 1800s. I now make it at least several times a year and every time I do, I think of my Great-Great-Granny Euphemia Summers Peatie.

     

    Bill Rice is Founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook (Available on Amazon), both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing and is an avid genealogist tracing his family back to the 1600’s.

    Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest!

  • Recipe Development Journal Now Available

    Recipe Development Journal Now Available

    Are you the kind of person who likes to build a recipe from scratch while cooking? Or maybe take a dish you had in a restaurant and try to recreate it? Or maybe think back to your grandmother’s meatloaf recipe, that she never wrote down and you want to recreate? We have something to help.

    The Family Cookbook Project Recipe Development Journal is now available on Amazon. It was designed to provide you with an organized place to develop and test your very own recipes before you enter them into your family cookbook.

    8.5″x11″ in size, each recipe is a two page spread with loads of space to add and cross out the details of your next great recipe. It has all of the fields of a Family Cookbook.com “Add a Recipe” form to make it easy to add to your cookbook when complete.

    • Recipe Title
    • Prep Time
    • Servings
    • Original Source of This Recipe
    • Ingredients
    • Notes
    • Directions
    • Memories or people who I think of when I make this recipe

    This Recipe Development Journal makes a great gift for friends and family or just get one for yourself this holiday season.

     

     

     

    Bill Rice is Founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook (Available on Amazon), both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing and is an avid genealogist tracing his family back to the 1600’s.

    Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest!

     

  • Making A Recipe Your Own

    Making A Recipe Your Own

    Recipes are all around us. We find recipes that become favorites and mainstays for our own families. Printed cookbooks, from friends and family, old recipe boxes, magazines, newspapers, websites are all sources of great recipes.

    When we find a new recipe, we often will modify that recipe to make it our own. Sometimes it is by eliminating some of the ingredients, adding different ingredients for different amounts of the ingredients, or simplifying the directions. All are ways that we make a recipe our own.

    Family cookbook project makes it easy for you to get these recipes into your own family cookbook. Whether you type them in, cut and paste them from a document or website or upload an image of the recipe, we make it easy to collect your favorite recipes in one printed cookbook.

    However, we also have a responsibility to those people who created the original recipe. It is very appropriate in your personal note to include the source of the original recipe.

    While it is generally accepted that recipes cannot be copyrighted, photos certainly are. If you add a photo from a recipe that you found until you’ve been able to make the recipe and replace it with your own photo, you should mark your recipe private so it is not shared with anyone else outside your cookbook.

    For further reading, here are some links to articles on copywriting recipes.

    Copyright Office flyer on recipes
    https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html

    Copyrighting Recipes
    http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/copyright/copyright-realworld/recipe-copyrighting.html

    Questions & Answers – Copyrighting Recipes
    http://whatscookingamerica.net/Q-A/CookbookAdvice.htm

     

     

    Bill Rice is Founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook (Available on Amazon), both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing and is an avid genealogist tracing his family back to the 1600’s.

    Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest!

  • Preserving Family Recipes For Future Generations

    Preserving Family Recipes For Future Generations

    A lifetime of feeding our families can generate a wealth of tried and true family recipes. The recipes that everyone loves at holiday gatherings and the everyday meals that we used to feed our kids. All of them are special and need to be written down for future generations.

    In years past, our mothers and grandmothers used recipe boxes and index cards to keep track of their recipes if they ever bothered to write them down. Unfortunately if someone wanted a recipe, someone would have to find the recipe card, and hand write a new copy so that recipe can be shared.

    Today, computers and the power of the Internet allow us to create online cookbooks that can be printed and easily shared with friends and family members.

    A family cookbook allows us to choose which recipes were most important to us and tell the story behind the recipe. Which holidays was it used for, how did you get the recipe, who’s favorite recipe was it.

    Recipes are not just a set of instructions, The best recipes tell the story of the food and the family behind it.

    Here are some tips for starting your own family cookbook from Family Cookbook Project.

    Get others involved – Everyone in the family has their favorites, so ask them which recipes they would like included. You can even invite them to contribute and enter those recipes directly into the program to save you time and effort.

    Set a deadline – Everyone is busy and will wait until the last minute to contribute recipes. That is why setting a deadline at least a month into the future is a good idea. That way people have something to shoot for and give you a reason to contact them to remind them that recipes are due.

    Select a cover that stands out – People will judge this cookbook by it’s cover so make sure it reflects your family’s personality. You can include a photo or pick a design that is meaningful to yourself and the family.

    Include photos – Photos make a cookbook come alive. Showing images of family members, past and present, helps put the family in a family cookbook.

    Read the recipes – As editor, it is your responsibility to check the recipes for typos and completeness. If a recipe lists an ingredient, make sure it has an amount and is included in the directions as well.

    Print extra copies – Ask all of the family members if they want a cookbook before placing your print order (or give them as gifts for the holidays), but be sure to order a few extra copies. Once people see the physical cookbook, it’s amazing how many additional people will want a copy.

    A family cookbook is a rewarding project that brings a family together and is a reminder of one of the important elements that help bind us together – memories of family meals, the food that was served and the people who made them.

     

    Bill Rice is Founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook (Available on Amazon), both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing and is an avid genealogist tracing his family back to the 1600’s.

    Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest!

  • How to Order Your Professionally Printed Cookbooks Video

    How to Order Your Professionally Printed Cookbooks Video

    Here is a short video to take you step-by-step through the process of having your personal cookbook professionally printed and bound by FamilyCookbookProject.com

     

    About the Family Cookbook Project

    The Family Cookbook Project helps individuals and families collect and preserve the time-honored recipes that are so important to our family traditions. The website at www.familycookbookproject.com provides step-by-step instructions and online tools to create a valuable family heirloom that preserves recipes and memories for future generation.  Personalized cookbooks are also used by schools, church and other groups as important fundraisers.

  • The Holidays Are The Best Time to Start a Family Cookbook

    The Holidays Are The Best Time to Start a Family Cookbook

    To most of us, the year-end holidays are a time of family, friends and a lot of food.  While these times can be hectic with all of the running around that needs to be done, it is also the best time to start a family cookbook project, says one expert.

    “Many of the family holiday traditions start in the kitchen and center around the meals we serve our family and guests at this time of the year”, says William Rice, Founder and Co-Publisher of the Family Cookbook Project. “What better way to celebrate our family food traditions than to preserve them for future generations in a family cookbook. There is no better time to start planning a family cookbook than over a wonderful meal during the holidays”.

    A successful family cookbook needs at least one dedicated individual to lead the project as editor. This person gets the project off the ground and invites family members to contribute recipes.  Once a labor intensive task, now families are using the Internet to simplify the project.  “A website, such as FamilyCookbookProject.com, can provide step by step instructions and tools to help the family member serving as cookbook editor to contact others and encourage them to enter their favorite recipes directly into the online system,” says  Rice “The editor then simply reviews and edits the recipes, selects printing options, and sends the cookbook to be printed.  The finished printed cookbooks are received in a few weeks time and can be enjoyed and preserved forever.”

    Here are some tips from Familycookbookproject.com to help make your family’s personalized cookbook a success:

    Start talking about the project over dinner – Enjoying the food and dishes we love while being asked to contribute recipes will make the value of the project more real and worthwhile.

    Have a sign up list for those who want to participate – Get everyone’s telephone number and email address in one place. This will help when it is time to be in contact with them over the project.

    Pass out recipe forms after the meal – Having printed recipe forms lets people know what they need to provide and shows them how little work contributing will be.

    Invite everyone to participate – Don’t just invite the family cooks. Everyone has at least one recipe that they can contribute to the cookbook. Use email to invite and stay in touch with contributors. Let them see what others have submitted to encourage them to keep adding their best recipes.

    Set a deadline – Set a deadline one or two months in the future to have all of your recipes submitted. Most people work better if they know they face a hard deadline. If you don’t have enough recipes at the deadline, you can always extend it.

    Keep in touch – After the holidays, keep in touch with everyone via email. Send regular updates and let them know who is participating and who is not.  Set a goal to have every family member contribute at least one recipe so they can be listed in the list of contributors.

    Consider using a Website, like Familycookbookproject.com, to help organize your family cookbook. Here are just some of the benefits of www.FamilyCookbookProject.com:

    – Editors can send contributors an email to invite them to participate in the family cookbook.  The site also makes it easy to send regular updates by email to some or all of the contributors.

    – Allows individuals to enter their recipes directly into the online family cookbook so it does not fall entirely on the editor.

    – Provides an easy way to share recipes online. Contributors have access to everyone’s recipes even before the final family cookbook is printed.

    – Provides many options for recipe layout and cover selections or allows you to create your own cover.

    Family cookbooks are an important way to preserve our mealtime traditions for future generations. With the passing of our loved ones comes the loss of treasured food traditions. A family cookbook ensures that the recipes from one generation can be passed on to the next as a treasured family heirloom. Once the recipes are preserved online, they can be shared with other family members by email, printed individually and included in your own professionally printed cookbook.

    For more information on how your family can make a family cookbook, go to www.FamilyCookbookProject.com.

     

     

    Bill Rice is Founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook (Available on Amazon), both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing and is an avid genealogist tracing his family back to the 1600’s.

    Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest!