I love cooking. Most of my skills in this area were honed when I worked as a line cook in various restaurants but they started watching people in my family cook.  My grandmother was your typical Italian Nonna, always at the stove making something delicious. My mom wasn’t what you’d call a great cook (she liked to overcook everything “just to be safe”) but she had a handful of go-to recipes that we all loved. There were other people who had signature dishes that they always brought out during the holidays.

Over time I started developing my own recipes and I was pretty haphazard about where I kept all my notes. Most of the ones I really liked made it into a small notebook that saw a lot of use (it’s currently held together at the binding my duct tape) but there were papers stuffed into folders, notes written into cookbooks with alternate ingredients / timings and in text files on my computer.

I decided to collect them all into one definitive source a ‘family cookbook’ that my kids could one day reference when they want to make the nostalgic meals that they remember from their childhood or have a recipe be passed down to another generation.

My recipes were easy – bit by bit I imported  them into OneNote and formatted them into a logical cookbook format (ingredients, methodology, cook time, etc.). My family’s  recipes were a bit harder as most of them were never written down. I narrowed them down to a few that I felt were important enough to include then dredged my memory to try to recall the ingredients and methods that were used. I had to get creative and try different approaches but I think I came as close as I possibly could.  I did have a copy of my grandmother’s recipe notebook which contained all her baking recipes. The only issue there was it was written completely in Italian. Luckily I was learning Italian this year as well so it was a win-win translating the ingredients and instruction into English!

As I was developing these I took lots of pictures but there were some recipes where I either didn’t have a photo or the ones I did have weren’t very good. I absolutely was shameless in finding a stock photos that looked exactly like what I made only with better lighting. I wasn’t trying to publish this book so I didn’t concern myself with the ethics of that decision, I just know some of these stock photos were really good and representative of what I was putting out.

I tinkered with InDesign to see if I could make a standard cookbook but instead opted for a web service as their drag and drop methodology was much easier to work with and I could see in real time what the results would be.

All in all I was happy with how it turned out – going to wait until a sale comes around on the book publishing site before I get a physical copy – sometimes those coupons they send can be a real value!