Category: General Cookbook

Here is a great idea for your Mother’s Day idea – a personal cookbook filled with Mom’s favorite recipes and photos. Imagine having all of her favorite recipes in one beautiful printed cookbook to be passed down for future generations.  That would make a truly unique Mother’s Day gift that would be remembered for a long time.

 

There are a few ways Family Cookbook Project can be used for a Mother’s Day gift.

• If Mom is able to use a computer, she can select the recipes she wants to pass along and write her memories of them and why they are important to her.
• If Mom is computer-challenged, someone can sit with her going over her recipes and entering them for her. This is a great bonding experience and can unlock cherished memories.
• If Mom has passed, entering her recipes into a family cookbook is a great way to pay tribute to her and become a gift to the next generation of mothers.
• Sometimes a recipe box can be used to get the ball rolling. It can be fun to see which recipes bring back strong memories of food, family and good times.

Family Cookbook Project has helped tens of thousands of people create their own printed personal cookbooks. It is the fun, easy way to organize recipes and preserve her favorite family food traditions! Our product offers the ability to create online cookbooks with unlimited recipes and easy-to-use design tools. When you’re done, you can order printed versions for the whole family.

Our Make-a-cookbook software allows you to do it yourself or have others help! Invite family or friends to add recipes and photos for a finished product that’s truly unique! Fill your cookbook with photos, stories and handwritten recipes for a gift that’s thoughtful and practical and makes a great gift.

With 100s of layout and cover options and easy to use tools, you don’t have to be an expert to create a cherished heirloom that will keep our favorite recipes and memories alive forever.  Perfect for users of all ages, our software is highly intuitive and user-friendly as we automatically generate indexes, the table of contents and more.

To start your own family cookbook, go to FamilyCookbookProject.com or you can give a gift certificate to start an account for your mom.

 

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.

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Chili is always a family favorite and most families have many chili recipes depending on the branch. A fun event for bringing the family together is to host a chili cook off where everyone brings a crockpot full of chili and a blind tasting is used to determine which chili will win the prize that year.

Here are some rules and guidelines we at Family Cookbook Project use when our family has a chili cook off.

Pre-Chili Cook-Off Planning

• Invite guests to bring their best chili in a slow cooker, hot and ready to serve. Encourage a variety – meatless, spicy, white, or surprise ingredient. Have them bring their recipes as well.
• Not everyone has to bring chili but make sure you have no more than 10 options for people to try otherwise they will get overloaded and not be able to tell the difference between each participant.
• Make sure you have enough bowls and spoons or buy disposables so everyone can have a separate spoon for each chili.
• Make Chili Name Tags with the name of each chili, a rating for heat level and the entry number.
• Make enough ballots so each guest has a ballot for each chili. The ballot should have entry numbers from 1 to 10, a space where the taster can rank them from 1 to 10 and a third column for notes.

Chili-Tasting Set-Up

• Just before the guests arrive, set up a Chili Toppings Bar—offer a variety of chili toppings and “go-withs “. Include shredded cheese, chopped onions, tomatoes, olives, bell peppers, sliced jalapenos and sour cream for toppings. You can get these ready the day before. Just cover and refrigerate until needed. Great go-withs include crackers, corn bread, tortillas and corn chips.
• You may want to invest in several power strips to plug-in the crockpots spread out among several outlets, so you don’t pop a circuit breaker.
• Offer a variety of drinks; soft drinks, beer and maybe even a signature cocktail. You can also add a tossed green salad and dessert to round out the meal.

Suggested Rules of the Cook-Off 

• Keep the name of the cook of each chili secret—as to not throw the vote!
• Invite your guests to taste a spoonful of each chili and fill out a ballot for their favorite before eating it as a meal. Disposable spoons make this more sanitary. Have them clean their palate between tastings with a little water or soda cracker.
• Have guests rate each chili on the ballot. The chili with the most points wins!
• Announce the maker of each chili and then announce the winner.
• Award prizes – grand prize, hottest, most creative, or easiest for just a few ideas. Amazon.com has some great chili contest recipes that you’ll find here.
• Add each of the recipes to your family cookbook. You can even create a stand-a-lone chili cookbook to share with family and friends.

If in doubt you can always check with the experts at the International Chili Society. They have a whole laundry list of rules and regulations for how a chili cook-off should be run.

Post-Chili Cook-Off 

Gather all of the recipes from the event, along with photos of everyone having fun and put together a small Chili cookbook for everyone who attended so that the event can be relieved for years to come.

At the end of the day, you want everyone to have fun and enjoy the food.

 

Bill Rice loves Chili and 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!

FamilyCookbookProject.com answers hundreds of emails a week with basic questions on how to do various aspects of creating a family cookbook. So we came up with the idea to put all of those answers in one place.

Welcome to the Family Cookbook Project Editor Education Center. Here you will find the answer to that age-old question “How do I…”.

When you don’t know how to do something, start here and get specific instructions on how to accomplish most aspects of creating the perfect family cookbook.

You will find a link to the How To Center in the black navigation bar on every page of FamilyCookbookProject.com.

 

 

Bill Rice is 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 (Available on Amazon) and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook, both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing.

Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest!

 

 

This Interactive BBQ Word Search Puzzle is brought to you by Family Cookbook Project, the leading Online Cookbook Publishing Platform on the Internet today. Start your own BBQ Cookbook to share with family and friends at FamilyCookbookProject.com.

Interactive BBQ Word Search Puzzle

Downloadable PDF version of this BBQ Word Search Puzzle.

 

 

The loss of a mother or grandmother is a difficult time for most people. The love and nurturing they provide is something that we will never forget is always to be cherished.

One way to memorialize a loved one who has passed, especially someone who was responsible for cooking for the family, is to create a family cookbook in their honor.

Often a collection of recipes in the form of a recipe box, magazine and newspaper clippings, or cookbooks with pages marked is a great place to start creating a cookbook in someone’s honor.

Another way to gather recipes is to reach out to families and friends and ask for which foods that person was known for. Getting others to share recipes and memories adds a lot to the process and to the final product.

When entering recipes into the system, remember to write personal notes about why this recipe reminds you of the person you were honoring. It could be memories of when they’ve made that recipe or serve that recipe or just examples of food that they loved.

Including lots of photos is also a great way to make your special cookbook a tribute to the one you love.

 

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!

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!

It’s true, the hardest thing about working with FamilyCookbokProject.com is getting all of our beloved recipes entered into the system so we can create a one of a kind cookbook for family and friends.

You have several options when you want to enter a recipe into your own recipe book.

Here are some of my favorite:

Typing – This is straight forward. You open the Add A Recipe form and use your keyboard to type in the recipe and click on the save button (don’t forget the last part!).

Other People Typing – One of the features that makes FamilyCookbookProject.com unique is that we make it easy to invite others to contribute recipes to your cookbook so you don’t have to do all of the work. Use the invitation tool and have others submit recipes that you can then edit. It’s a great way to build a family cookbook and brings everyone together.

Cut and Paste – If you already have many of your recipes in a text format, like in a Word document, you can cut and paste the recipes into the form. This also works when you find a recipe on a website and you’d like to include it in your cookbook.

Here’s how: Simply highlight all the ingredients in your source document and hold down the Ctrl key while pressing the “C” key on your keyboard. Next go to “add a new recipe” in your family cookbook site. Click in the ingredients box and now hold the Ctrl key while pressing the “v” key. This pastes what you have copied into the field. Repeat for title, directions and notes and you are done!

Import a recipe from a website – We have created a tool to import recipes from some websites. However, it does not always work because every website is different in the way it lays out its recipes.

From your quick start editors menu, click on the Recipe Center button. There you will find a link to “Import Recipes from another website”. This will allow you to take the URL from the recipe page and try to import it into your cookbook. If that does not work, you can cut and past the ingredients and directions into a new recipe page which is very easy to do.

Dictate recipes – If you don’t like to type, you can also talk your recipes into text form that can be cut and pasted into the Add A Recipe form. To see how to do this, see the recent blog post How to Dictate a Recipe Into Your Family Cookbook Project.

Use a photo – One of the most asked questions we get is “How can I scan a recipe and use it in my cookbook?”

If you have a recipe box or collection of recipes that you would like to scan and use as your recipes in a family cookbook, it can be done. However, a problem with scanned or photographed recipes is that the system can not read the text 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 preserved the original form of  the recipe card and makes the recipe highly readable.

Second, you can upload the recipe card image on the Add A Recipe form as the recipe itself and just type the recipe title and contributor name. This saves typing and you get to use the image as the entire recipe. You can add personal notes if you want.

So however you get your recipes enter your recipes into FamilyCookbookProject.com, it is the first step to creating what will certainly be a treasured family heirloom to be passed down to future generations.

 

Bill Rice is 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 (Available on Amazon) and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook, both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing.

Follow Family Cookbook Project on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest!