Our hearts go out to anyone in our Family Cookbook Project.com community that have been affected by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, either through sickness, loss of a loss loved one, loss of employment, or the effects of social distancing. This affects all of us and only together will we rise above and beat this crisis.

With the forced isolation brought on by social distancing and quarantines, we have seen an increase in the number of recipes being added to the system each day. Our system is designed to handle any increase in traffic with minimal impact to the user. We hope this also corresponds with an increase in trying new interesting family recipes since dining out options have been limited.

As a Family Cookbook Project editor, here are some ideas to add a silver lining to this crisis.

• Reach out to your contributors and ask them if they have any extra time to contribute a few recipes to your cookbook.
• If you’ve already printed your cookbook, now is a good time to unlock it and ask contributors to start working on volume two.
• Add to a recipe story. Family Cookbook Project.com offers an online ability to add comments to recipes that you’ve tried in memories that you have. Ask people to contribute their stories to the recipes they make and try.
• Use your extra time to review for more than 50 professionally design covers available for your cookbook and get it ready for printing.
• Create a specialty cookbook. Do you have a lot of dessert recipes or maybe ethnic recipes? Consider creating a small cookbook with just those recipes. These kind of cookbooks make great gifts.

These are just some simple ideas to help you take your mind off of the difficult times we are experiencing and look forward to a brighter future.

Bill Rice is founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect and share food memories through customized printed cookbooks filled with treasured recipes. Follow us on Facebook and Pinterest!

For many generations, recipes were handed down by word of mouth from mother to daughter. Recipes consisted of a little of this and a smidgin of that. The food always came our great – or at least that is what we told out mothers!

Today things are different. Computers make is easy to write down our recipes and share them with friends and family members over the Internet. However it is important to remember that cooking has a language of its own. It is a language of ingredients and measurements and directions. I believe the most important of these is measurements. If we did not have standard measurements for cooking, “T” could be a teaspoon, a tablespoons, a thimble full or a truck load! Here are a list of Standard Measures Abbreviations commonly used in recipes.

teaspoon……………………… tsp.
tablespoon…………………… tbsp. or T.
cup…………………………….. c.
quart…………………………… qt.
ounce…………………………. oz.
pint…………………………….. pt.
gallon…………………………. gal.
inch…………………………….. in.
pound………………………….. lb.
milliliter…………………………. ml
liter……………………………….. L
milligram……………………….. mg
gram……………………………… g
kilogram ……………………….. kg
millimeter……………………… mm
centimeter…………………….. cm
meter……………………………. m
Celsius…………………………… C
Fahrenheit……………………. F

Another important thing about standard measurements is that they don’t work if you don’t use them! Including an ingredient in your recipe without a specific amount is likely to leave someone trying the recipe for the first time scratching their head and wondering what to do. Remember know one will know unless you include it in your recipe.

Bill Rice is founder and Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect and share food memories through customized printed cookbooks filled with treasured recipes. Follow us on Facebook and Pinterest!