Starting a Cookbook - The How To

This has been a summer long process and I just finished this past weekend. Back in 2009 for my mom's birthday and Christmas present, I had made a cookbook out of all of her recipe cards that were bent out of shape and falling out of her recipe box. I typed it up and printed it off and put it into a binder. At the time I didn't really know what I was doing and have since learned my lesson. This summer however, was spent adding new recipe's that she had found from magazines and Pinterest as well as fixing old recipes.

When I started this back in 2009, I had put it in an excel file. Not really sure why but I did it that way and would definitely recommend not doing it that way, but hey I was only freshman in high school who didn't know any better. Now I would say Microsoft Word is probably the better choice.



I modeled the pages after another cookbook mom had and remembered her telling me that she liked the design. On the left is the ingredients, and on the right is the directions. But what makes this one different is that there are breaks in between, linking the ingredients with only a certain section of the directions.


For the page numbers I abbreviated whatever the category was for the particular page and used the number key that is in Microsoft Excel. This was so that I could add more pages later on.



Once printed, I put them in page protectors and then in a binder. I had made a table of contents as well as an index. We discovered that because the pages were in the page protectors that the tabs we had gotten were too small and would not stick out. So I printed out a page for each section with different fonts and then a box around it. On the edge I used permanent markers and colored about 1/2 inch on the right side.

Because I had used a binder with a front pocket I was able to find a nice front off of Bing pictures. And made my own spine that had the name of mom's cookbook "Holly's Family Cookbook." Even though it took me most of my summer. I think my DIY cookbook turned out to be a success.