Custom Cookbooks

Bundle family recipes into a tome of tasty treasures

Story and photos by Lisa Aurand

The first step in assembling a cookbook is deciding what recipes you want to feature. Planning out your cookbook well in advance is important if you need to gather recipes from other family members – and especially if you want to include photos of each dish, as did Columbus resident Rachel Tayse Baillieul.

“I wanted to do it … in 2010. I sat down to start writing to make a list of all the recipes that I thought were unique to our family, and I didn’t have pictures of all of them and I didn’t have details for all of the recipes,” Baillieul says. “That was around Thanksgiving, so I just couldn’t pull it together before Christmas.”

In the following year, Baillieul took photos of recipes as she and her family members made them and asked clarifying questions when necessary. Aware of her food and urban homesteading blog Hounds in the Kitchen, www. houndsinthekitchen. com, her family didn’t find Baillieul’s activities suspicious.

Great Gift Idea!

Take a look at the recipes you have and decide how you’d like to arrange them. Baillieul’s list was heavy on baked goods, so she hunted down a few additional recipes to balance it out and then chose to arrange the book by season, interspersing recipes with snippets of family memories. An editor friend read through the recipes for her to catch typos and missed recipe steps.

Once you have your recipes together, it’s time to decide on how you’d like to format the book.