Categories: Recipe

How to make a Cookbook

Published by
James marcus

Preparing For Your Book

There are a handful of options for accompanying your recipes with a visual. You can have the original chef send you a photo they’ve taken, find a royalty-free photo online, draw a basic illustration, or take a fresh photo yourself. For the latter, cooking and photographing each dish over time is all part of the creativity process, so have fun with this step! One of our favorite pointers for how to make a family cookbook is to involve the kids or your spouse in the kitchen, allowing for their artistic input when styling in your shots. After all, we can all use new family activities! Whether you keep it messy and authentic or carefully staged (on new tableware for the occasion, perhaps?), we find this step to be the most hands-on and imaginative.

With so many photo books to choose from, every vision has match. For the most user-friendly cookbook, we recommend the Everyday Photo Book or Layflat Album, whose pages will lie flatter and stay open without assistance — so you can follow steps without contact from messy, mid-meal hands. If you have more than 45 dishes to include, you may want to consider a Hardcover Photo Book or Softcover Photo Book, which offer higher page counts. Customize your creation to your liking with its fabric color, foil stamping, and other personalization options. No matter which book you choose, the end result will look and feel professional.

When it comes to your DIY recipe book, the title can be as literal or as clever as you please. Let simplicity guide you here — and feel free to use the these ideas as a jumping off point:

  • Jones Family Recipes
  • Supper & Sweets
  • Quarantine Cookbook
  • My Favorite Paleo Plates
  • Days in the Kitchen
  • A Taste of 2020
  • Lunches for Littles
  • Grandma’s Greatest Plates
  • Cooking At Home
  • Plates & Bakes

Including an introductory note can help set the tone for your book or dedicate it to someone special. This is a great place to highlight the backstory around the recipes inside, tip a hat to contributors, and inspire the reader. If your book were a meal, itself, think of this intro as a place setting!

Laying It Out

Next: laying it all out. When it comes to plotting your book, we recommend using one page (great for when a recipe doesn’t have a photo) or a full spread per recipe (your recipe on one side and photo on the other). As you mentally plot your format, start dropping in placeholders or text notes into the spreads to guide your creation. Don’t feel confined to one format for the whole book — some recipes may warrant more space or emphasis than others! The most important rule of thumb in any DIY recipe book is that it’s clear.

Once you have a rough understanding of your book layout, the next step in learning how to make your own cookbook is to place the recipe text into the pages. If they take the form of photos (from the “gathering recipes” step), then the hard part here is done! If they’re still plain text in another doc, you have a few options:

Whether each recipe has an accompanying image or you’ve made visuals for just a handful of them, it’s now time to drop those in. Again, these images can be simple photos you’ve taken on your phone, or more advanced graphic files you export from any of the programs we named in the previous step.

Bringing It to Life

Each step in creating a DIY cookbook is fun in its own right, but we believe printing and sharing it to be the best part! Thinking about making it a gift? Print one for yourself and have duplicates on hand to give to family, contributors, or friends. (You can even make it together.) Who wouldn’t love cooking up a new creation that you came up with, or seeing their own recipes “published” in a homemade book that lives on? Recipe books serve as a simple way to connect with each other from your own kitchens, every time you make a meal.

James marcus

Garden Courte is a blog written by [James Marcus], a passionate gardener and writer. She has been gardening for over 20 years and has a deep understanding of plants and how to care for them. In her blog, she shares her knowledge and experience with others, providing tips and advice on gardening, plant care, and more.

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Published by
James marcus

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