The Family Cookbook Project

Category: FamilyCookbookProject.com

  • How To Make A Bridal Shower Cookbook

    Here is a great idea next you need to plan a bridal shower for a friend or family member – a bridal cookbook!

    One thing every new bride to be needs is great recipes to feed her family. Both families as well as friends can help get this started by contributing recipes as part of a bridal shower!

    Here’s how to do it:

    When you send out your bridal shower invitations, include a link to your family cookbook project cookbook, use the Invitation Tool and add everyone’s email. This will send everyone a link that will allow them to contribute their recipes. Set a deadline for entering recipes about three weeks from when the invitations are sent. Remember people will also wait until the deadline!

    Get both of the mother’s to contribute the most recipes if possible. This way both the bride and groom with have lots of recipes that they grew up with in their cookbook. Using Family Cookbook Project’s Custom Categories Tool, you can even create a special category for each mom’s recipes.

    As the recipes are being entered, start planning how the cookbook will look.

    Cover – Family Cookbook Project offers several cookbook covers specifically for bridal cookbooks or wedding cookbooks. You also can create a custom cover with the name of the cookbook and a photo of the couple.

    Write an introduction – The best bridal cookbooks will have an introduction written by the individuals giving the bridal shower. An introduction can be used wish the couple well wishes and to talk about the importance of family.

    Add Photos – Photos can help bring your cookbook to life. You can add photos of the lucky couple on top of recipes, or create custom pages to highlight photos of the bride and groom as they were growing up and while they were dating.

    Finally, it is time to print your cookbook. Make sure you give yourself enough time to order your cookbooks and have them printed, at least 3-4 weeks if possible. Be sure to order enough copies for each attendee as well as several extra copies for family members that can not attend the event.

    For the event, make some of the dishes from bridal cookbook and serve them at the event. Include a place card with the dish name and include the page number from the cookbook. Finally, if you are looking for a great wedding favor, try creating a Wedding Cookbook for your family and friends!

     

     

    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!

  • Recipe Standard Measurements

     measuring_cup

    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 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!

  • Keeping Your Cookbook Contributors Motivated

    megaphoneAs with any family project, getting everyone to contribute can be a challenge, especially if they have not seen the end product beforehand.

    Here are some tips to keep your contributors motivated:

    The more the merrier – Be sure to include everyone, not just the great cooks. Everyone likes to be asked to participate and the more you invite, the more recipes you’ll likely get. To add contributors and send an email invitation, > Use the Invitation Tool

    Set a reasonable deadline – Set the submission deadline on the “Project Information Editor” page, but don’t set it too far in the future. We all tend to put off whatever we can and contributing recipes is often one of those things. A month is usually enough time to give everyone to find the recipes they want to contribute and get them entered. Two things to remember: most of the recipes will come in just in time for the deadline and second, you can always extend the deadline if you want more recipes.

    Send regular updates – Use the Reminder Tool to email some or all of your contributors on a regular basis. Remind them of the deadline and ask them to meet a specific goal, like “please add one or two recipes to each category”.

    Target the biggest recipe boxes – Every family has a handful of people who are known for their cooking (you are most likely one of them in your family!). Send a personal message to them either using the remainder tool or reaching out by telephone, Facebook or with a personal visit. People are flattered when their skills are recognized. Let them know the cookbook would not be complete without their contributions.

    Ask for specific recipes – Send a reminder to everyone asking for a specific recipe from your family’s past that will get everyone thinking of past gatherings. Include your memories of that dish or the person who created it. It might help remind everyone why putting together a family cookbook is important.

    Use social media – As you add your own recipes to your family cookbook, it is easy to post them to Facebook or pin them to Pinterest. Sharing your recipes this way shows other family members that you are contributing and shows them they should as well.

    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!

  • Why Blank Pages Are Important In Your Family Cookbook

    Blank_Cookbook1

    One of the questions we get a lot as Cookbook Publishers is “how do I remove the blank pages in my cookbook?”

    It seems that when people preview their family cookbook on FamilyCookbookProject.com, they see the cover, then a blank page, then the title page, then another blank page, and so on. They want those blank pages eliminated to lower the cost of printing.

    In publishing, especially cookbook publishing, a cookbook needs to be laid out in a specific way in order for the most important pages to be on the right side when the book is opened. Think about it, Whenever you open a book, the title page is the first thing you see and it is always on the right page of a two page spread. Same goes for the Introduction, Table of Contents and the section dividers.

    On FamilyCookbookProject.com, if you create a preview cookbook PDF, you want to open it in your Adobe Reader program and select the option to view “Facing Pages” or “Double-up” (look under the View menu), you’ll see how the pages back up to each other.

    Now with that said, there is no reason why those pages have to be blank. The inside front cover can have a family photo photo or bio of the cookbook editor. The same goes for other blank pages as well. If your introduction is one page and after it is a blank page, consider writing more, adding a photo or even making the text larger to fill up that extra space.

    One benefit form using FamilyCookbookProject.com is that we provide a complete set of handy kitchen information that can be used on the back of the recipe category dividers with the touch of a button.

    Bill Rice takes more than 20,000 photos a year and 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!

  • The most important part of your recipe – the title

    495379recipepic65541-Jacques-Torres-Secret-Chocolate-Chip-Cookie-RecipeYour recipe title is the single most important element of your recipe. This is because your title is a headline, and the headline in any type of content has one special and powerful property.

    Think about how you read a cookbook looking for a recipe to try.  You don’t start in the front and read every page like a novel then pick the one you want. No, you scan the pages looking for a photo or recipe title that catches your eye and looks interesting!

    Of all the elements in your recipe, the title has the greatest power for grabbing your readers’ attention and the greatest responsibility for enticing them to continue and read your recipe It follows that the better your title, the higher the chance of turning a recipe scanner into a recipe reader (and ultimately a recipe user).

    For a recipe title to be effective it needs to consider several things:

    Grab Attention – Like any headline you need to grab the readers attention.

    Describe the food being prepared – “Gruel” is one of my son’s favorite dishes, however it no one outside the family knows what it is. Including the main ingredient of the dish and even how it us prepared make the title more useful. “Baked Hamburger Gravy” would be a more descriptive title for our gruel.

    Be different and unique – If you have seen the recipe title before, it does not belong on your recipe!

    Include the source – In family cookbooks, certain people are associated with certain recipes. Grandma’s Apple Pie or Lou’s Lemon Bars help the reader image exactly what dish you are referring to. It just does not help anyone who is not at family gatherings!

    Sell the sizzle as well as the steak – This means to highlight the benefit, the reason why this recipe is worth making.

    Recipe titles that address cooking and eating needs are more likely to seduce the reader into the recipe itself. A good title clearly shows the reader which of their cooking and eating needs the recipe addresses. Every readers’ need is different. For example, it could be for something indulgent or something low fat, or something quick and easy or something sophisticated and thus involved, or something refined or something rustic.

    Consider the following recipe titles: ‘Soft and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies’, ‘Quick ‘n’ Easy Chocolate Chip Cookies’, ‘Grandma’s Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies’, ‘Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookies’. Notice how each title addresses a different need and even appeals to different audiences. Quite simply, as the chocolate chip cookie examples show, it’s all down to the words you choose for your title.

    With a little thought and imagination, your recipe titles can stand out and make your readers give your recipes the attention they deserve.

    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!

  • Let’s Make A Family CookBook Deal!

    LET'S MAKE A DEALOnce again Family Cookbook Project has been asked to provide one of the prizes for this favorite TV game show. One of the prizes that contestants will try to determine the value of will be a Lifetime membership to FamilyCookbookProject.com and 10 copies of their personalized cookbook.

    Let’s Make a Deal is one of America’s best loved game shows and has been on the air since 1963. People in wacky costumes try to be selected to receive a gift and then are asked to trade for “what’s behind curtain number one!” or some other possible great prize or maybe get zonked.

    Be sure to watch the Let’s Make a Deal on CBS on November 25 2015, the day before Thanksgiving. Enjoy the show and know that your Family Cookbook Project continues to receive national attention.

     

     

  • Recipes on the Internet

     

    Young and beautiful housewife woman cooking in a kitchen

    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 7000 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 10 years ago, family cookbook project has helped more than 63,000 families and fundraising groups collect more than 1 million recipes.

  • Christmas in August?

    Christmas in August?

    I don’t know about you, but in August on Cape Cod we are enjoying fine summer weather and fun times with family and friends.

    However if you like to give incredible personalized gifts for the holidays, now is the time to start your family cookbook project.

    The best holiday gifts are not something you buy in the store. The gifts that make people feel most appreciative are those that you put a little effort into. Time is a valuable resource and people appreciate when gifts are more than just something purchased at the last minute.

    People who receive your personalized cookbook will never know just how easy it was to create using family cookbook project.com. All you need to do is enter your recipes, pick a cover and dividers, and we’ll do the rest. You can add an introduction and photos if you want.

    However, while it is easy, it does not happen overnight. Your personalized cookbook needs to be printed on our professional cookbook printing presses. Plan on submitting your print order by sometime in October to avoid the busiest time of printing.

    That means September is the time that you need to have your recipes submitted and your introduction written.

    So while you may be spending time on vacation in August, create an account at family cookbook project and creating a one-of-a-kind gift giving opportunity for the holidays.

    To learn more and get started, go to www.familycookbookproject.com

  • Family Cookbook Project In the News

    We helped Mary V. Danielsen of Documented Legacy learn more about the ins and outs of creating a family cookbook project and she wrote a series of articles entitled “The Joy of Preserving Family Recipes” and “Organizing Your Family Cookbook Project” for the Flip Pal Mobile Scanner website.

    “Determine who is going to contribute recipes. Make certain you invite everyone in the family to participate in the project”, says Chip Lowell, publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project. “People will let you know if they feel over committed and want out.”

    The articles are well written and provide some good tips editors can use to have their family cookbook move forward.

     

  • Print Your Cookbook For the Holidays

    Christmas CookiesThe holidays are right around the corner and family cookbooks make a great gift for family and friends – and it is the busiest time for Family Cookbook Project in terms of printing cookbooks for families.

    If you plan to have your cookbooks printed by us and received by Christmas, the deadline to order and make payment is Sunday, November 30th. There will be an extended deadline, but expedited shipping will be required. Let us know if we can help!

    If you need your family cookbook for Hanukkah, the print deadline is Thursday, November 20th.

    So get your contributors to submit their final recipes and start reviewing everything to get your cookbook ready to print before the holiday deadline to have a wonderful family heirloom to share for generations.