Sixtysomething_S2_Ep10_Create a Family Cookbook

Sixtysomething_S2_Ep10_Create a Family Cookbook

[00:00:00] GTS: Hello everyone, and welcome back to 60 Something. I'm Grace, and I'm so glad you're here. Today, we're diving into a project that's perhaps a bit ambitious, but will result in a valuable heirloom for you and your family: creating a family cookbook. A few years ago, I put together a cookbook to honor my mom with just her recipes and a couple of my grandmother’s recipes. The cookbook wasn't just about sharing and preserving their recipes; it was about keeping their spirits alive in our family and sharing their love of cooking—or maybe more like, uh,

[00:00:50] GTS: their love of nourishing loved ones and passing all of that on to the next and future generations.

[00:01:01] GTS: Why take the time and go to the effort to create a family cookbook? Well, for me, it's about more than just food. It's about legacy—of course, a small eye-roll. But listen, home-cooked food tells a story. Family food traditions tell a story. Every recipe holds a memory, and each time we make it, we're bringing that memory back to life. When I made our family cookbook, I knew I wanted to celebrate my mother and my grandmothers in a way that future generations could connect to. Well, my mom couldn't cook worth a darn. I never really learned how to cook growing up either. Grandma Liz, my mom's mom, felt that

[00:02:00] mom would have plenty of time to do household chores as a wife and mother after she grew up.

[00:02:05] GTS: So she didn’t have to do any of that as a child and, therefore, never learned until she went to college and got married. It was exactly the same way with me.

[00:02:19] GTS: Since my mom didn’t know how to cook when they got married, my dad basically taught her how to make all the things he liked. He did know a little bit about cooking, though his mom couldn't cook either. She could make two things well:

[00:02:38] GTS: the best pot roast you've ever had and a devil's food chocolate cake with that gooey, white, seven-minute icing—the kind that turns into crust after a couple of days. My dad really loved that. Mom's mom, Grandma Liz, she could

[00:03:00] cook. She made pies, especially, that were like something to be served in heaven—two and a half-inch high meringue and just melt-in-your-mouth delicious. Her mother, my great-grandmother, who we called Nanny, was an outstanding cook. She had the gift and made the best chicken and dumplings on the planet. My dad loved them, and we traveled seven hours to her house in Macon, Missouri, so she could show my mom in person how to make them. When my mom tried to just follow her recipe, it didn’t turn out well. After this in-person lesson, eventually, Mom did get it right, and she taught me.

[00:03:54] GTS: Back to my mom learning how to cook from my dad.

[00:03:56] GTS: It was pretty much the basics: bacon,

[00:04:00] hot dogs, meatloaf, horrible, horrible roast that was like eating leather. The first time my mom made a Thanksgiving turkey, she served the meal, and I'm guessing the center of the turkey was frozen. Anyway, it didn’t cook right, and I still remember sitting at the table, and my dad starts to eat the dinner and stops and says,

[00:04:31] GTS: My mom put her head down on the table and cried. It was so sad and obviously one of the more memorable Thanksgivings. But the good news is the next year she made it just right and then cooked Thanksgiving dinner every year for 40 years until I took over. I must say, I make it just like she did—wonderfully.

[00:04:59] GTS: [00:05:00] Well, nobody has put their head down on the table when I've made Thanksgiving dinner. I did once try to serve some dish—I can't remember what it was—that didn’t turn out very well. Aaron took one bite, stopped, and looked at me and said, "I don't know about Gentiles, but Jews can't eat food like this." Well, these days, Aaron does almost all the cooking.

[00:05:30] GTS: I do the baking, and he does the cooking. The one thing we had going for us food-wise during my growing-up years was that my mom was brought up in a family of meat snobs. Her dad was a salesman for M.C.A. Meat Packing Company, Blue Bell, and then he opened his own meat-packing business. So when it came to steaks, we had to have only the best

[00:06:00] from a butcher shop. Every week, we would go to see Maurice at his shop, and Mom would get steaks, which my dad would cook on the grill every Saturday night.

[00:06:11] GTS: We'd all be given our choice: filet, ribeye, or T-bone. Eventually, Mom wanted to try to make boiled shrimp for shrimp cocktail because we all loved it, or more likely because Dad asked her to, and Maurice sold that too—jumbo shrimp. He told her exactly how to cook it, and every once in a while, she'd make that for us. Things were looking up. But truthfully, I was a little kid; everything tasted okay to me. I had nothing to compare it to. A little story about Maurice: he came over once for dinner.

[00:06:52] GTS: My brothers and I were not home. I think Dad wanted to sell him an insurance policy, so they have a nice

[00:07:00] dinner, but my dad has to leave during dessert because he had an appointment, you know, to hustle some insurance. So he left, and no one ever had a thought about my mom being left alone with our sweet butcher Maurice. Well, of course, he made a pass at her. She rebuffed him and sent him on his way.

[00:07:22] GTS: Fortunately, we moved shortly after. We lived in a very small town, and I'd hate to think we'd have had to eat grocery store meat. Oh, wait, there was one more thing Mom could make pretty well: chocolate chip cookies. They were just the Toll House recipe, and she used Crisco instead of butter. They were okay,

[00:07:46] GTS: but she was famous for them. Oh my God. Every Friday, Mom took her dozens of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies to school. She was a teacher. For her

[00:08:00] coworkers, she put them in the teacher's lounge, and she delivered them to all the bus drivers. I can't count the number of Fridays I’d wake up to get ready for school, to the aroma of cookies baking, and go out of my room and see Mom asleep at the counter, waiting for the buzzer for that batch to go off. I can see that in my mind at this very moment.

[00:08:30] GTS: Things changed with Mom's cooking

[00:08:32] GTS: when we moved after my dad was transferred to a new office, heading up an agency for Equitable Life in Rockford, Illinois. His promotion led to my parents entertaining regularly, and Mom wanted to do all the cooking herself. So she didn’t buy a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking or take a cooking class; she joined the Betty Crocker Recipe

[00:09:00] Club and was sent a set of recipe cards every month. She started trying out the recipes from the cards. Things improved as she learned to make a few new things like lasagna, German potato salad, and steak san marcos, which is round steak with tomatoes and gravy.

[00:09:25] GTS: But a real turning point was when Dad asked one of the two wonderful Italian-American couples they knew through his work. And it was funny; their names were Steve C. and Marcy Cacciatore and Steve J. and Marcy Cacciatore. They were cousins. Same name, same wife names. Yeah, I think it was Steve C. and his Marcy who one night came over and cooked us their

[00:10:00] special family recipe of meatballs and red sauce. I had never had such delicious food. They taught Mom how to make this.

[00:10:10] GTS: And from then on, we have had the Cacciatore meatballs every Christmas Eve. Those meatballs, stuffed mushrooms from one of the recipe cards, and the giant shrimp cocktails—thanks to Maurice—became our family's Christmas Eve meal from then until today in many of our homes.

[00:10:38] GTS: The leftovers from this meal are wonderful.

[00:10:41] GTS: Bowls of meatballs with sauce, heated up—so delicious, no pasta needed. Mom would put the leftover shrimp in that great big, giant green Tupperware bowl everybody had back then, and the cocktail sauce in a smaller one. And throughout the holidays, you could just

[00:11:00] go to the refrigerator, get your meatballs or a bowl of shrimp as much as you wanted because she’d make a ton with the cocktail sauce, and just sit there blissfully eating that yummy food.

[00:11:15] GTS: Even so, I did grow up rather deprived of good food. For example, I made an amazing discovery when I went to college and had my first meal in a Chinese restaurant. I thought I already knew all about Chinese food because Mom served it regularly in our house. You know, that La Choy chow mein in the can. Yes, that’s what I thought Chinese food was.

[00:11:46] GTS: What a revelation. She also served tacos—the hard-shell kind—but she didn’t read the directions on the box. So she’d make the tacos

[00:12:00] without baking the shells, and it was like eating cardboard. Also, they would just have meat on them, no cheese or lettuce or anything.

[00:12:09] GTS: Uh, she was a funny one. Needless to say, once I grew up, the food world was my oyster. So the point of all this regaling you with stories of food and especially bad food from my childhood is just to say that you don’t need a heritage of amazing recipes to put together a wonderful cookbook. My mom did learn to make some good dishes, but even if she hadn’t, I suspect some of them would have been my sentimental favorites.

[00:12:40] GTS: As a matter of fact, some of the not-so-great ones are, and they made it into the cookbook. They’re recipes but more reminders of the basic food we ate, like chipped beef on toast or the very simple French toast Mom used

[00:13:00] to make: Wonder Bread dipped in egg and milk fried in a pan. I think I even included our go-to dessert when we had no dessert: bread and butter and sugar. Last week, I got a text message from my sister-in-law, my brother's wife.

[00:13:17] GTS: And we're very friendly—I love her—but we don’t communicate much. So it was kind of out of the blue. She asked me a question, which was, and this is exactly what she wrote, "How do you make barbecued ham? Scott and I are having an argument." And I'm thinking to myself these three things: I always hated barbecued ham; it was a staple

[00:13:43] GTS: Dad liked, so we did have it a lot; and I don’t think there was a recipe. I'm pretty sure it was just barbecue sauce bought at the store with ham heated up in a pan. So that’s what I told Lynn.

[00:14:00] GTS: But I'm mad now that I didn’t think to put that in the darn recipe book. So even if your mom or dad or anyone in your family didn’t or doesn’t cook well, the thing about it that really matters is this: when my mom died, I wanted to commemorate her life in a special way. Pulling together her recipes, as well as some favorites from my grandmothers, along with the stories and photos—especially of my mom in the kitchen—seemed like a wonderful, perfect project to accomplish that. And indeed it was received with so much joy and appreciation. Well worth the effort. Creating a family cookbook might feel a little overwhelming at first, but with a few steps, you’ll be ready. Here’s where I recommend you begin:

[00:15:00] Gather the recipes. Look through old recipe cards, family notes, or even ask family members. It can be a group effort.

[00:15:08] GTS: Mine wasn’t because I wanted to surprise my family, and I'm sort of known as the keeper of the recipes, photos, and stories. But for future cookbooks, I will definitely reach out and ask for their input and their recipes. One thing I did for my cookbook that I loved was scanning images of the actual recipes in my mom's handwriting and placing those on some of the recipe pages.

[00:15:40] GTS: Each recipe should have a memory or a story that goes along with it. When I made mine, I added a little story to each one and some photos to accompany each recipe. I put photos of the finished product. Even if I didn’t have any, I would just find them online and use a stock photo. But of course, you can also take photos of recipes that you make—that’s even better. Anyway, the stories and the photos that I used turned a basic cookbook into a treasured keepsake. Next, organize the flow. Think about the order of your recipes in your cookbook.

[00:16:32] GTS: I found it helpful to group by themes, like family favorites, holiday traditions, or even by person—Mom, Grandma, Taylor—they each got their own little section. Create all of this content, place it in folders organized by themes or sections. To organize the pages, I used a folder for each recipe, and then you’ll have everything you need for that particular page.

[00:17:06] GTS: Once you have all of your content ready, it's time to bring it to life. So here are two tools I highly recommend. You’re going to need to digitize everything: the recipes and the stories. They’re easy—just create them in a Word document or a Google Doc, and both of those programs have dictation features.

[00:17:28] GTS: So if you don’t feel like typing everything, you can just dictate and then go back and edit and format the recipe or the story. Photo scanning can be a bit more of a challenge. I recommend using an app called Photomyne. It's perfect for digitizing those cherished family photos, whether it’s an old black-and-white picture of your mom cooking or a family gathering shot. Photomyne makes it really easy to scan and enhance the quality of old photos.

[00:18:05] GTS: There’s no scanner required. You just basically open the app, take a photo of several photos at once, and then Photomyne will scan and crop the photos in the photo array that you just photographed.

[00:18:28] GTS: I also use Canva. Canva has easy-to-use, specific cookbook templates that make the design process for a cookbook really simple. You can adjust colors, fonts, and images to really make it your own. Plus, it’s free for basic use, and there are cookbook templates available to free account holders.

[00:18:53] GTS: I checked. There are also free cookbook templates for Word and Google Docs. I’ve linked to some of those in the show notes. And I can’t recall if I’ve linked to this before, but of course, I'll link to my cookbook in the show notes so you can take a look. I’d also like to mention that I made two versions of my cookbook. I linked to both of them.

[00:19:20] GTS: One is graphically designed with lots of photos, but the other is just plain black and white—no photos, no stories, just the recipes in case people wanted to print them. The background color of my cookbook is red, so it’s not very printer-friendly, and that’s why I did the plain version. When I do additional cookbooks, and I plan to, so that the whole family can contribute their own recipes,

[00:19:50] GTS: I will choose a background that is lighter and more printer-friendly—not only so that people can print it out on their own home printers, but also to have the option of creating a version that can be made into a physical book on Amazon. Friends and family members could order it, or because you’d get a very steep discount if you buy your own books on Amazon, you could just buy them and give them away or sell them at your cost, which I think is $5 or less depending on the size of your book. One important note to consider, though: color on Amazon is expensive. So plan on that if you’re interested in that option; you may want to keep photos to a minimum. They’ll just appear in black and white. I'll link to the information about making a book on Amazon.

[00:20:48] GTS: I’ve actually created several text-based books myself for a friend who’s an author. They’re not graphically designed; they’re

[00:21:00] text set up on Amazon and printed as a paperback book. Believe me too, these books are beautiful. It’s not that hard to do. I highly recommend it. You’re going to lose a little in the translation in terms of the beauty of color, but good news—the front and back cover as well as the spine are in full color. I'll link to a couple of the books I set up for my friend

[00:21:28] GTS: so you can see what they’re like.

[00:21:32] GTS: There are also cookbook services where you submit your recipes and some photos, and they actually create a cookbook for you. I'll put a link to one or two of those in the show notes too. I haven’t actually gone that route myself, but a friend of mine did, and her cookbook turned out beautifully. You know, it's just the custom, personal touches you add that make a family cookbook priceless. The photos and your stories bring so much warmth and personality to the recipes. I made sure to include photos of my mom in the kitchen, as I mentioned, and photos of our family throughout—and many wonderful stories. That's what made it truly special.

[00:22:21] GTS: That’s what makes it an heirloom. Once your recipes, photos, and stories are placed into the template, you’re ready to finalize your masterpiece. Canva will allow you to download it as a PDF, which is perfect for sharing digitally or for printing. When I made ours, I shared it with all the family members, and it became a precious gift and practical too. Several people have told me they’ve referred to it repeatedly when making one or two of Mom’s recipes. Now it lives in my Google Drive, where I have my

[00:23:00] Taylor family archive, which includes all of the photos I’ve scanned—over 2,500. Videos I’ve had digitized, the cookbook, and other documents

[00:23:11] GTS: I want to share with my family members and future generations. Creating a family cookbook is a gift to yourself and your family. It's a project that does take some time and effort, but it's worth every minute because you’re not just passing on recipes. You’re sharing a beautiful piece of your family’s history. So gather your recipes, stories, and photos, which is a pleasure in and of itself, and go for it. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode. I hope I’ve inspired you to try creating your own family cookbook filled with those stories and recipes

[00:23:58] GTS: that keep your

[00:24:00] family spirit alive. Let me know if you have any questions, and please share your page from your cookbook in our Facebook group. The link to that, as always, is in the show notes. Please subscribe, leave a review, and, hey, follow me on YouTube now, where I’ll be sharing parts of this episode on video so I can show you some of the things I’ve talked about in this episode, as well as some behind-the-scenes fun stuff. In the meantime, take care. I’m thinking for our next episode, we’ll learn all about pickleball with my expert guest and husband, Aaron Segal. Yes, Segal is back. I'll see you next time on 60 Something.