Creating A Cookbook

For several weeks I have been recuperating from emergency surgery for a detached retina. The Dr. says everything is healing nicely and I no longer have to wear an eye patch.

I had the surgery when I was half way thru a project of re-typing a few recipes for easier reading. I had been motivated by my sister, Esther when she told me she was re-typing some of their favorites and giving copies to her daughters. I wanted to do the same for Kim and Bob.

Esther and I began referring to the re-typed pages as our ‘books’. We compared notes on how many recipes we should include. At first we thought between 7 and 10 then decided 15 or 17 would be ok. We didn’t want to write a real cookbook, only one that had some of the family favorites. When our families found out about our little books, some of them wanted us to add one or more of their recipes. Esther and I agreed they definitely should be included, which in turn led to the promise of our exchanging books because we wanted copies of everyone’s favorites.

Somewhere between 20 and 30 recipes, I decided to decorate my pages with food photos. I didn’t realize I was in for a long bout of learning ‘how to’. I knew how to crop photos, etc. but I was in for a shock when I didn’t know how to place and keep them where I wanted them. Then along came the surgery.

When I was able to get back on the computer and work with the recipes and photos again, I mentioned to Esther, who was printing her pages on her printer that I thought the cost of Kinko’s publishing might be cheaper than my having to buy color cartridges for my printer. I had long since passed the number of books I planned to give away. Originally it was only going to be 3 or 4, but the list grew and grew. So did the number of recipes I kept putting in the book as I continued to ignore warnings from my son that I should seriously think of limiting pages or I would be in for STICKER SHOCK when I went to have it printed. Well……and then……

Necessity is the Mother of invention. I can email a copy of my book in PDF format to those who would like to have a copy.

UPDATE: The cookbook can be downloaded by clicking the link on the left panel.