M Is for Mom's Million Recipes

I've made a lot of Mother's Day gifts in my time. I'm sure that you have, too. One of the runaway hits in my family is the Mother's Day make-it-yourself cookbook.  It's a way of turning family recipes into collectibles. The best part, you don't need to be a Martha Stewart type to get decent results; even the most feeble efforts look great.

The idea is pretty simple. Get everyone in your family to contribute their favorite recipe(s) and a photo of themselves.  Create a template in Word for your recipe page, leaving room to add a photo or two.  If you haven't a clue about how a recipe gets formatted open a cookbook or borrow from places like epicurious or allrecipes.

It's nice to add a little family history to the recipe. "These were the potato pancakes your great grandmother made for every holiday."  "This was your father's favorite recipe when we were first married, but then I decided we didn't need the calories." "This was my favorite quick-cook snack in college."

Print the book on glossy photo paper. After much trial and error we set ours up in landscape mode using Word, and using the Print Preview menu to select "two pages per page" from the multiple pages icon.

We printed two recipes on each page of letter-sized paper, and then cut each page in half (using a paper cutter) so that the book's final size was  5½ by 8½. 

We've printed enough things like this that we actually invested in a book binding machine years ago. Unibind is one of many that make them. You can also go to places like Kinkos. They'll bind the book for you.

A few words of caution. 

If you don't have digital photos of the family member  use your scanner.

A printed book on glossy paper costs about $1 a page in consumables. Do a draft print before doing your book. Or, take a CD with the pages into Kinkos and have them do it, which will cost more.

Since photo paper is glossy you're only going to be printing a single sided cookbook.

Originally I wanted to include photos of the finished dishes. I wanted to show how mouthwatering the finished dishes looked. I found out that photographing food is an art form. As you may know, a good food stylist uses everything from shellac to styrofoam to simulate foods in their photo shoots. Food photos by a non-pro make every dish look like prison porridge.

A few gotchas, but all the same, you'll win big brownie points whether you're presenting this book to Mom or even to your  kids who haven't figured out how to boil an egg yet.