Recipe Book

My most recent project has been to produce a recipe book for my mother's Christmas present. She keeps all her recipes in a spiral bound notebook. When I was a kid I helped her transfer all the recipes from her old book to this one by hand. It's kind of cute to see my old handwriting and how I used to spell kitchen items like "flower" and "pinapple". I was over at her house the other day making Christmas cookies and I realized that her recipes were almost unintelligible from splash marks and food stains. I offered to revamp it for her. She actually already had a new book my brother had given her a couple of years ago, but she never got around to transferring the recipes.

I decided to type the recipes up so that it will be easy enough to transfer to the next recipe book after this one gets wrecked--which it inevitably will. I thought I'd be able to find a recipe template on the Internet that would make it easy. There were a few, but they were all created on MS Word, and it was a huge hassle to put the recipes into the template. I thought about just typing it on MS Word without a template, but that would've ended wasting a lot of paper, and I would have had to fiddle around with font sizing. Finally I decided to use MS Powerpoint, which was a brilliant move. You can print the slides out in a handout form. One slide per page was about the right size to fit the paper, but I thought it would be a waste of paper. So I did that for the longer recipes, but the shorter recipes I printed two slides per page. It worked out really great. I was able to choose a design that matched the book, and Powerpoint automatically changes font size to fit the slide, so no fiddling around.

I think it turned out really nice. The best part is I now have all my mom's recipes on my own computer. Someday I'll print them out for a book of my own, but until then they are easy to look up in my documents.