Best tips for storing your recipes in a cookbook online
People who enjoy cooking can often be categorized into two categories: the ones who carefully follow recipe instructions and the ones who love to play around with ingredients and improvise as they go. I’m more of a mix between the two. While I enjoy sticking to a certain recipe, if I feel like I could add a twist to take the dish to whole new levels, I do so. I trust my taste buds.
If you’re not necessarily the adventurous type in the kitchen but nonetheless still enjoy a good dinner cooking session, you surely gathered a few tried and tested recipes along the years. Maybe some of them are handed down from your mother or grandmother. Keep this tradition alive and save these beloved food memories in a free online cookbook.
Read on for more useful tips and tricks on how to make a recipe book online that you can pass on to future generations. Your kids will be thankful, for sure!
Here’s a quick guide on how to make a cookbook online:
- Curate your recipes
- Tell the story of your dishes
- Design your own cookbook online
- Share the love
For those of you who prefer to watch YouTube videos instead of reading long articles, here’s a cool video that will teach you a thing or two about how to put all your recipes in a cookbook online. Enjoy!
Curate your recipes
Food is a very important aspect in every family. I have this memory of helping my mom cook in the kitchen when I was little. Perhaps I was doing more mess than actually helping her out, but I have this clear image of both of us in the kitchen going through an old recipe book that she had for years. This is a dear memory that stuck with me along the way. So did the food I used to love when I was a kid.
It seems like our food memories are the most vivid. Even the most simple food, like a certain chocolate cake my mom used to bake for us during the holidays, it’s something that always made me feel nostalgic. Something that feels more evocative than any other type of memory I have from that period of time. Traditionally, every family has its own specific recipes that were usually stored in a recipe box tucked in the cupboard. But in the technology age, Flipsnack is a really easy to use cookbook maker that can make cooking a smoother process.
Food memories
And so, if you somewhat feel nostalgic about delicious childhood food or you’re simply stuck in a rut on what to gift your mother with, how about creating a family recipe book online? Or perhaps you’re a food blogger who wants to break through in the food publishing industry. Search no more! Put all your best recipes in a cookbook online and become a self-published cookbook author in o time!
Now, if you are planning on making a family cookbook online, the best tip here is to curate your family’s best dishes. Go over to your grandmother’s and choose your favorite food memories. Do the same with your mother. Going through old, stained recipe books will probably make you feel very nostalgic. But that’s the point, though.
Tell the story of your dishes
With every recipe you choose, you can tell a story. With this cookbook online, you get to tell the story of your family. Or simply put all your best recipes under the same roof. Think of a structure for your cookbook and let it guide you all throughout the process. Let’s take for example a family cookbook. Section the recipes into chapters like mom’s favorites or dad’s signature dishes and so on. If you’re planning on writing about French or Mexican cuisine, organize the dishes by different regional cuisines.
Goes without saying that the most obvious categorization of your cookbook would be to separate it into sections such as breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert recipes.
Another way to organize your cookbook is by difficulty. It will help tremendously to know if a dish is going to take longer to cook or if it requires professional chopping skills. It wouldn’t hurt to start with easy cooking recipes and continue with the more difficult ones.
No matter the approach, the structure of your recipe book online should always be intuitive, straightforward and accessible.
Cooking is fun!
Since we talked about stories, what kind of cookbook is that, where there’s no introduction before the actual listing of ingredients? A boring one, for sure. Stories always captivate. It’s in our human nature that we are attracted to storytelling. Now if we are still talking about making a family cookbook online, things are pretty clear. Start with an introduction, maybe talk a bit on why you decided to put all these recipes under the same roof and how important food is in your family.
Before each dish, talk a bit about its story. How your family discovered that recipe, maybe giving more details on when your mom or dad used to cook that. Share a bit of context.
When it comes to print versus digital, putting together all your family’s recipes in a cookbook online is kind of a big thing. Especially for the generations to follow. Not only it simplifies the recipe searching process but it makes it so much easier to start cooking. Adding explainer videos, tags and interactivity will only make it even more interesting and fun to flip through. After all, cooking should be fun!
But more than fun, the recipes listed in your cookbook should have clear instructions and measurements. Make sure to list instructions in the most logical method. Even add details that others would find useful such as preheating the oven or figuring out how a cake is ready baked. Even if you know all these details, it wouldn’t hurt mentioning them in your cookbook online. Not everyone has the same cooking skills or knowledge as you do.
Design your own free online cookbook
Making an aesthetically pleasing family recipe book online will require some design skills. Or at least, good photography.
We eat with our eyes! So, make sure to invest extra time and effort on taking good photos of your family’s dishes. And of course, for that to happen you need to cook them.
You don’t have to be Julia Child to make your own cookbook
Remember Julie and Julia? The 2009 movie with Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as Julie, the food blogger who had started documenting online her daily experiences cooking each of the 524 recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Do the same and document every recipe you’re cooking, take photos and add comments as you go.
Once you are done finalizing the layout, recipes, and photography, it’s time to talk cookbook design. So let’s start with your cookbook’s cover. Since we talked so much about a family recipe book online, it only makes sense to include your family’s photo on the cover. If you are planning to simply put all the recipes you gathered, from magazines or Pinterest, in the same cookbook online, have someone take a photo of you while you cook and use that as a cool cover for your book.
However, if we talk about food publishing endeavors, things get more complicated than this. For the entire cookbook cover design, your publishing house or editor will take care of all the design aspects for you. They know all sorts of tips and trick in the marketing area of food publishing. You may want to trust the experts.
A great DIY route when it comes to publishing your cookbook online is heading over to Flipsnack, a really great cookbook maker. Simply pick a cookbook template of your choice and use that as a starting point for your cookbook design.
Use a cookbook template as a base
Here is a very useful cookbook template that focuses mainly on desserts. But you can edit and customize to your needs. And the best part of the process is that you can easily embed explainer videos, add images and play around with fonts and custom colors. Easily personalize this cookbook template and make it look like a professional recipe book.
The quarantine cookbook
Cooking in the age of social distancing is not just for sustenance but for comfort and entertainment too. Nowadays we’re stockpiling our pantries and freezers and cooking a lot more. We’re getting creative, too, adapting recipes and stretching budgets. Here’s a great idea for you. Store all your best dishes in this quarantine recipes cookbook design template and have a bit of fun. Get ready to take some delicious photos and add them here. Fill the text boxes with your precious recipes and you are good to go. When you are done editing, make sure to share it with all your friends and family. Or print it out and store it in your kitchen.
Family Cookbook Template
There’s a reason the kitchen is the heart of the home. It’s where all the fun happens! It brings the family together and can remind us of experiences long forgotten. Preserving family recipes allows us to access these emotions any time we choose, whether it’s a holiday or a simple occasion. What about sharing these recipes with friends or even with a larger audience? If you’re thinking to do this, we suggest you should take advantage of our free family cookbook template. The minimalist and modern layout is very easily customizable and it’s also eye-catching. Add all your tips & tricks, mouth-watering images and your first cookbook is ready to be published!
Healthy Food Cookbook Template
Your food choices each day affect your health — how you feel today, tomorrow, and in the future. Good nutrition is an important part of leading a healthy lifestyle. Looking for ways to share your nutritious dishes with a wide audience. With the help of Flipsnack, now it is super easy. With our drag & drop editor, you can change the images with your own, the fonts, the colors, and also the text. Feel free to also insert captions or whatever you feel it’s necessary. When you have the final result, you can easily download this healthy food cookbook template, print it, and offer it as a gift to your loved ones. Or boast it on social media!
Share the love
Here comes the fun part of organizing all your best recipes in a cookbook online: sharing it with your friends and family. And we all know that food made with love always tastes better. So why not organize a dinner with your loved ones and cook something from this recipe book that you so hard worked on? It will be well worth it!
Goes without saying that nowadays one of the best methods to organize your recipes is through a cookbook online. Why not start one today then? Maybe use one of our many free cookbook templates.
Happy cooking!
