Memories and Recipes

Working through Blurb dot com, I am creating a book I hope will be passed down through the generations. It could even be a series of books, but I have to finish this one first. I have quite a few photos going back through the 1950s and further, even some as far back as the early 1900s, of my mother’s side of the family. I also have many handwritten recipes from my grandmother and her mother. And then there are those stories that family members have shared over the kitchen table. I am combing all of these into a book tentatively titled, Memories and Recipes.

Over the weekend I finally figured out a layout that will work for just about all of the recipe/story pages. Creating those pages will go much quicker now. The time-consuming part will be in testing the recipes and photographing the results. So far, I have only photographed one outcome. Winter is the best time to get all this cooking done, though. My goal is to have the rough draft completed by April. If I do at least one page a day, that will be no problem.

I’ve been trying to find a book similar to mine that has already been published, but they aren’t set up just like mine. Most focus on much more of the storytelling than mine does, only throwing in a recipe every few pages. None of them combine a family photo, recipe, and story all on one page as I’m doing. Most of the stories I have are just anecdotes, slices of life, not fully fleshed stories, which I think is more indicative of what people know of their families anyway. But my book will be something my daughters can hold in their hands and say, wow, I would have loved to have known my great-grandmother - she seemed feisty, like me.