Family Recipes for Life

Does your family have a favorite dessert recipe or two, or three or many?  Our family does and for years I have promised to put together a family collection of our favorites as a Christmas gift. Just one problem, that task always kept getting pushed to bottom of the to do list.  October of this year rolled around and things were no different, I had started a new full time job in August, family and church responsibilities, trying to stay on top of three residences and not doing too good at job at any of them, there was excuse after excuse I could make.  Somehow I had waited long enough and I decided on November 1, 2011 to complete the project I had started 4 years prior.

Originally it was to be cookbook of all the family favorites, including Granny Gibson’s chicken and dressing, Granny Hoover’s tasty slaw dressing along with favorites of Mom’s and Sue Vada’s which all the children grew up eating.  However, once I rolled up my sleeves and got into the thick of compiling and laying out the book, I quickly realized in order to meet my December 25th deadline it was going to be a book of favorite dessert recipes this year.

In the past I’ve created a few self published coffee table style books, one for Nibby’s parents Norris and Mary Elizabeth Priests 5oth wedding anniversary, and one for my father, Elmer Gibson’s 75th birthday as gifts.  For these I used mypublisher.com and they turned out to be very nice and beautiful books.  This time however after some online research I stumbled across blurb.com website and found they have easy to use recipe templates which makes organizing and editing a cookbook a breeze.  So after many hours of reviewing family recipes and photographs I got started.  Some 40 or so hours later the book in the cloud was ready to be uploaded to the blurb.com website and my family’s Christmas presents were ordered.  Five days after that they were delivered to my doorstep in two different formats, a hardback version, complete with dustcover and a lesser priced softbound paperback version.  Blurb.com also offered a ebook version for your ipad, so when your baking in the kitchen you can just pull out the ipad and pull up the recipe.

If you’ve ever thought of producing a family compilation of recipes for yourself or as a gift I would encourage you to do so.  It’s a wise investment of time and resources to create a treasured momento you and your family will have forever.  Not to mention all the family favorites in one place.

Have you thought of producing a family cookbook? If you choose to do so  you and your family will cherish your labor of love forever.