Category Archives: cookbook software

Your Recipes on the Internet

One of the benefits of having your recipes on Family Cookbook Project is that they become available to you from any computer.

Google and other search engines regularly crawl our site looking for new recipes. When they find them, they make them available to the entire Internet. That way you can access a recipe simply by typing in The title of a recipe and your cookbook name into any browser.

This is useful for when your family cookbook is not available, like at a grocery store buying ingredients for recipe, or wanting to share a dish with a friend.

You also can have access to all your recipes if you download our award-winning mobile app for iPhone and android devices.

Not only are the recipes made available to you online, but many other people around the world can enjoy them as well.

Currently the most popular recipe on family cookbook project.com is Saskatoon Berry Crisp, by John and Verna Heinrichs, is from The Heinrichs Family Cookbook . This recipe has had almost 50 people view the recipe in the past month.

Be all time most viewed recipe on family cookbook project.com is Camp Fire Pizza Roll, by Danyeil Reed, is from 40 Something Cowgirls Restless Riders Cookbook, which has been seen by more than 7,000 people since 2013!

Of course if you don’t want to share your recipes with the public then simply mark them private when you post them. This keeps them out of the public domain.

Since our founding 15 years ago, Family Cookbook Project has helped more than 63,000 families and fundraising groups collect more than 1.5 million recipes and that number grows every day.

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!

The Holidays Are The Best Time To Collect Recipes

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Creating a family cookbook is a very satisfying event. However getting everyone Else in your family to contribute their favorite recipes is always one of the challenges to printing your cookbook in a timely manner.

However, the holidays are a great time to motivate your contributors and gather lots of incredible recipes.

The holidays are known for two things: gathering together with friends and family in parties and dinners, and bringing out tried-and-true family favorites that don’t necessarily get made during the rest of the year.

Look at Christmas cookies for example. How often do you make Christmas cookies in July? Have you ever made a plum Pudding for September? how about a roast turkey with stuffing and all the sides including cranberry sauce for a nice Wednesday evening meal? probably not. These are all safe for the year and holidays.

The other aspect of holidays are large gatherings, being a holiday party or a dinner with extended family. Often people bring side dishes and appetizers and desserts as they are part of the meal.

This is a great opportunity to let people know what you like and ask them to contribute that specific recipe to the family cookbook. They will feel proud that everyone loves their dish and will be more likely to contribute it knowing people will enjoy it.

Asking people face-to-face is always a great way to get recipes, however reminding them via email after the holidays is also an important follow-up. Family Cookbook Project has a reminder tool that will allow you to select the people you had spoken to during the holidays and remind them to submit their recipes. This is a good time to Osco ask them to enter additional recipes that they love.

Cookbooks for Kids

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One of the reasons we works so hard on a family cookbook is to preserve our favorite recipes for future generations. It is equally important to help that next generation develop a love of good food and cooking at an early age. That is why Family Cookbook Project created a simple cookbook just for the kids in your life.

Kids Cookbook Project lets you create your own customized cookbook for the special little one in your life. Simply enter your child’s name and choose boy or girl and immediately preview them in their own special personalized Cookbook! We will then print your full color customized, personalized kids cookbook. It’s just $24.95.

Keep Kids Interested in Reading …put them in the story! Every child loves a story. A good story helps them to explore their imagination. A great story has them as the main character and holds their interest in reading. That’s what we do! …Kids Cookbook Project makes great stories about children with your child as the main character. And we make it easy and simple to do …as simple as 1-2-3.

As the holiday’s approach, this would make a great personalized gift for the youngsters in your life. To learn more and to order. visit Kids Cookbook Project.

Bill Rice is Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect and share food memories. Follow us on Facebook and Pinterest!

Family Cookbook Project Now offers WW SmartPoints on recipes

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Family Cookbook Project, an online leader in the creation of personalized printed cookbooks, has added the ability to include WW SmartPoints® on recipes being added to a user’s collection of recipes.

WW (formerly Weight Watchers) SmartPoints* is a system where every food and drink is assigned a point value, and you receive a certain number of SmartPoints to allocate however you’d like every day and week. SmartPoints is designed to help guide you to a healthier pattern of eating every day.

“Living a health lifestyle and eating right is what WW SmartPoints are all about,” says Bill Rice, Founder and Co-Publisher of the Family Cookbook Project. “Family Cookbook Project has added a field to It’s easy-to-use Add a Recipe form so that users participating in the Weight Watchers program can have an easy way to include the SmartPoint value when adding a recipe to their online recipe box. These recipes can them be printed into a personalized cookbook including all of their favorite recipes.”

WW’s science-based SmartPoints system assigns every food a number based on four components: calories, saturated fat, sugar, and protein. The higher the number, the more sugar and saturated fat the food will have. The lower the number, the less it will have. The reason for this is that numerous studies have confirmed the benefits of eating less sugar and saturated fat, and more protein—not just for weight loss, but all sorts of other healthy reasons too.

Family Cookbook Project editors can turn on WW SmartPoints® by going to the Recipe Center and clicking on the link “WW Smartpoints Use/Show”. There are two settings: one for allowing contributors to add WW SmartPoints® to a recipe and another to include SmartPoints in the printed edition of the cookbook.

In addition, Family Cookbook Project is developing a simple to use calculator that will calculate the SmartPoint value of a food simply by entering information from a food’s packaging. We expect this to be introduced early next year.

With over 4.6 million users, WW is the most trusted source of weight loss guidance in the world. Family Cookbook Project believes their success is based on meeting the ever-changing needs of our valued customers. “This is just one more example how Family Cookbook Project is putting our customers first,” added Rice.

*WW SmartPoints is a trademark of WW International, Inc. and are not associated with Family Cookbook Project, LLC.

How To Scan Recipe Cards into a Family Cookbook

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Many of us have old recipe boxes that contain many many recipes that are written in the handwriting of someone from the past that we would like to preserve and include it our cookbook.

At FamilyCookbookProject.com, you can scan a recipe, personal letter or other family treasure and include it in your cookbook very easily. Here’s how: First you need to scan the recipe card or find someone who can do this for you. Many people have home scanners that are very easy to use – or know someone who has one.

When scanning, make sure the scanner saves the image as a JPEG file (check the settings). If it saves it as a PDF, you will need to open the PDF and “save as” a JPEG. Another setting you need to check is the image quality. Usually 150 to 300 DPI (Dots per Inch) is high enough for including in your cookbook.

Scanning actually creates a photo image of your recipe card that we can import into your cookbook software. Now your scanned image can be simply placed into your cookbook as you would any other photo.

Collections of Scanned Recipes

Sometimes family cookbook editors was their entire cookbooks to be a collection of scanned recipes. While not impossible, this can be a lot of work for the editor.

The problem with scanned recipes is that the cookbook software system can not read the text in the image to create titles and indexes and other parts of the cookbook. The computer just sees them as photos.

So you have two options:

You can include the scanned images as photos attached to recipes that you have typed into the system. This way the original item is included above the typed version. I don’t know about you, but my mother’s cursive writing is not always the most easy thing to read (sorry mom) and recipe cards are often smudged with food from meals passed and not always easy to read.

The other option is to enter just the title of the recipe and it’s category and leave the rest of the fields on the “add a recipe” form blank. This will give you the title of the recipe and allow an index to be created. Next upload the scanned image of the recipe and it will appear with the recipe title.

Bill Rice is Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect and share food memories. Follow us on Facebook and Pinterest!

Organizing your recipes in your Personal cookbook

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Over the past 15 years, Family Cookbook Project has continually updated its software to meet the needs of you, our cookbook editors. One of the things that we have done is make it easy to organize your recipes as much as you’d like. This blog post will go over some of the ways you can organize how your recipes appear in your personal cookbook.

Recipe categories

Recipe categories are general classifications that allow similar recipes to be placed together. For example, appetizers or desserts. Here are some of your options for categories in the Family Cookbook Project:

Default categories – when you first start your cookbook, these are the categories that are assigned to every cookbook. They are well thought out and can cover just about every type of recipe you may want to add to your cookbook.

Custom categories – whether you want to add just a single new category or completely redo the categories to best meet your needs, you can use the custom category tool to accomplish this.

Subcategories – One of the newer additions to the software is the ability to add subcategories to your cat. This allows you to group recipes of a specific category under the main, or top-level, category. For example in the default category appetizers and beverages, you may want to create a subcategory for appetizers and a sub category for beverages. That way each type of recipe appears with like recipes.

Recipe sorting

Recipe sorting determines in which order the recipes appear within a category. Here are your options for recipe sorting:

Shortest to longest – this is the default sorting option. It places the shortest recipes upfront so more recipes can appear on a single page. Usually it is the most cost-effective way to organize your recipes.

Alphabetical – this is a very popular way to sort your recipes. The titles are organized alphabetically so that As come before the Bs and so on.

Custom Sort – One of the coolest additions to the software is the ability to sort your recipes anywhere you want. This tool will show you a list of all your recipes and you can move them to the location and it makes sense to you.

How you sort your recipes is completely up to you. Family Cookbook Project just wants to make sure you have the tools you need to create the perfect personalized cookbook.

Sample of the custom sort tool

Bill Rice is the Co-Publisher at Family Cookbook Project which helps individuals and fundraising groups create cherished personalized cookbooks using the power of the Internet. Follow us on Facebook and Pinterest.

Top Cookbook Covers of 2018

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At FamilyCookbookProject.com, we offer 55 different professionally designed covers to help editors create their perfect cookbook. We thought it might be interesting to see what was the most popular covers printed over the past 12 months. Here are covers chosen on print orders in 2018. Note, Garden 1 is the default and sometimes people with full custom covers have that and it’s hidden, but they did not actually choose it.

The most popular cookbook cover last year was Recipe Tree, accounting for almost a quarter of all printed covers. This is followed by Custom Covers when editors use their own design skills to create a personalized cover.

To see all of our available professionally designed cookbook covers, go to the Layout and Design Center in your editor’s account and select Cookbook Covers.

Bill Rice is the Co-Publisher at Family Cookbook Project which helps individuals and fundraising groups create cherished personalized cookbooks using the power of the Internet. Follow us on Facebook and Pinterest.

Rating Your Favorite Recipes

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Creating a printed personal cookbook on FamilyCookbookProject.com can be a rewarding experience, but your interaction with the website does not have to stop there.

A majority of people who have created cookbooks continue to use the website as an online resource either from their desktop computer or by using our “award-winning” mobile app.

One fun thing to do is to rate the recipes you use from your cookbook.

Rating recipes is easy. Go to the “view recipes by contributor” and find the favorite recipe that you have added to the cookbook so far. Click on the title of the recipe to view it. Right under the title is something that says “Rate this recipe” and 5 gray stars. To rate this recipe, simply click on the last star of your score. So if you think it is a “5 star” recipe, click on the last star. If it is a “4 star” recipe, click on the fourth star and so on.

You can also click in between to stars to give it a 4.5 star rating!

The next person who views the recipe will see your rating (although they will not know it came from you) and will be able to leave their own rating.

Over time you will see how many people rated your recipes and how much they liked them. It is one more way FamilyCookbookProject.com helps to build a dialog around your recipes.

Give it a try today and invite the others in your cookbook to do the same!

How To Bold Text In Your Family Cookbook Project Recipe

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Have you ever wanted to call everyone’s attention to a specific line an a recipe?

Do not cook longer than 10 minutes!

Add ingredients in this specific order!

Do not preheat your oven!

Certain directions are critical to the outcome of a favorite dish and Family Cookbook Project as made it easy if you want to bold your text in a recipe. You just have to learn HTML or Hyper Text Markup Language, the programming language of every website on the Internet.

Now before you say “I’m not a computer programmer, I can barely turn on my laptop””. It’s super easy for what you want to do.

In directions, comments and ingredients when you are adding a new recipe, you can use simple HTML tags like:

BOLD
Italic
Underline

Replace the word between the tags with what you want to appear in that format. It’s as simple as that!

For example Do not cook longer than 10 minutes! looks like this Do not cook longer than 10 minutes!

If you use Do not cook longer than 10 minutes! it will look like this Do not cook longer than 10 minutes!

and if you use Do not cook longer than 10 minutes! it will look like this Do not cook longer than 10 minutes!

The most important thing to remember is that all tags start with “<>” and end with a “</>”. If you forget the /> then every thing else in your recipe will be based on the tag you used. Don’t forget your “</>”!

Family Cookbook Project is always looking for ways to make your favorite recipes come to life for you and your family.

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Scouting Cookbook Covers Added to FamilyCookbookProject.com

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A great scouting fundraising idea is to create a Scouting Fundraiser Cookbook. While the Girl Scouts have their cookies to sell, most troops rely on other means to raise the funds for trip trips, Eagle projects, summer camp and upgrading camping gear.

The Family Cookbook Project knows how important a fun and easy fundraising project is for a troop to raise the funds to support the outstanding job at helping to develop our countries next generation of leaders. That’s why we help been helping troops raise money with Scouting Fundraising Cookbooks for years. Not only can it be profitable, but it is a fun project the scouting families can enjoy as well.

To help support the scouting community and make creating a Scouting Fundraiser Cookbook even easier, The Family Cookbook Project has introduced four new scouting-themed covers that can be used on a troop cookbook.