I know that I haven’t written any blog posts for quite some time. But I’m excited to share some of the food related things that I’ve been working on so far this year.

One of them will have to wait until 2024 as I’m not allowed to share about it. I was just a minor help, but it was still a fun process that I would totally volunteer to help with again! More on that next year!

But one that I can talk about is the online class that I took called “Cookbooks on KDP” (Kindle Direct Publishing) taught by Maggie Green of The Green Apron Company. I have listened to Maggie’s Podcast, the Cookbook Love Podcast, for the past couple years. She is a published cookbook author and teaches classes on how to get a paid cookbook publishing contract. That’s beyond my expertise, at least at this point. But she mentioned a new pilot class she was teaching on self-publishing a short recipe book of family recipes. Well I have plenty of those!

I LOVE cookbooks - I have over 100 at this point with many waiting in my Amazon cart! I collect them, cook from them, organize them, and read them in bed. I have wanted to write my own cookbook for the past few years, but there’s only one major problem with that - I don’t develop my own recipes. I just follow others’ recipes. And I’m really good at it. I’ve developed enough skill that I usually pick out ones that I’m highly likely to enjoy, and I’m usually correct. I can also tell when something doesn’t look right, and I can correct it. And I’ve gotten really good at substitutions as I hate going to the store for one ingredient. So I’ve learned how to follow recipes as well as make them my own. But to come up with something from scratch would be a real stretch at this point - maybe someday in the future, but not yet. So when this opportunity arose to write my own cookbook, but just use recipes that are already developed, I was really excited to sign up.

The goal of the class was to self-publish 2 books in 90 days. And while I officially hit the “publish” button on KDP at 106 days, I still accomplished my goal! KDP is Amazon’s self-publishing website where you can publish a book and have them print it and distribute it for you. This platform was super easy to use and a great resource for those who want to self-publish for a variety of reasons. I used Canva to create the interior and exterior of my family cookbook and the exterior of my recipe book. The interior of my recipe book was purchased on Etsy where they have multiple templates to use that are compatible and customizable on KDP and Canva.

The first book we worked on was a low-content blank recipe book such as one you use to write in your own recipes. This was used to teach us about setting up the book and learning so much about margins (who knew they were so important!). This also got us comfortable using tools and platforms that I had never heard of before this class. This took the first 30 days.

Then the next 60 days were focused on our family recipe cookbook. I had already collected and typed most of the recipes into Google Docs before the class started as I knew my time would be limited due to working full time. I ended up with 30 recipes in the book in the categories of appetizers, breads, vegetables, soups, and desserts. Over half of the recipes are in the dessert chapter as my family is really good at these, and we enjoy them so much! I’m quite proud of the book I’ve made and those that I’ve told about it have been excited for me too!

If you are interested in ordering either or both books, the link for the blank recipe book is here, and the link for the family cookbook is here. I hope you get some use out of them as it truly was fun to develop and publish them myself with help from Maggie!

It took 4 editions of proofs to get the family cookbook right!

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The Cookbook Cook’s Family Cookbook