Putting together your own recipe book can help you organize your kitchen and can also make for a great gift idea. Here are some things to consider before you get started.

Gather and Organize:

The first thing you will want to do is to get all of the recipes that you want in your book together. You may want to contact some friends and family to get some of your favorite dished of theirs, or you might want to take some from some of your favorite books so you can have them all in one place. For the latter, just for the sake of organization, make copies of the book pages so you can have all your recipes in one hard-copy file before you start typing them up for your book.

Organize the recipes you have gathered into separate categories and sections such as desserts, appetizers, main dishes, etc, and fasten the different sections in hard copy form together with a stapler or paper clips.

Making the Pages:

You will, of course want to make sure that your computer has a good word processing software program. If you don’t have MS Word, you can get a program called OpenOffice online for free.

Start to input your recipes, one per page, into your document. You will, of course, want to type them accurately, but chances are you will make the occasional tying error. Before you get to the printing stage of your project, then, you will want to make sure to proofread each and every recipe carefully. We all know how big the difference between and tablespoon and a teaspoon can be when it comes to the finished product.

After you have typed up all of your recipes, number the pages and create a table of contents. You may not want to list every single recipe, but you will at least want to have the titles of your different sections in the table of contents so you can quickly find whatever it is that you are looking for.

Depending on whether you are simply making a recipe book for your own organizational purposes, or you are self publishing a short run cookbook for gifts for friends and family, you way or may not want to include photographs and a special cover design. If you do decide to include these items, make sure that the photos are high resolution so that they will translate well to the printed page.

Print up all your pages and read over them with a red pen at the ready to catch and mark all spelling and grammar errors, and to make sure that you like the placement of the photos and the overall look of the pages.

Printing and Binding:

If you are making gifts, and have decided to use a few color photographs in your book, you should spring for the highest quality digital printing you can afford.

As far as the spiral binding, your copy center should be able to do it, or if you have more of a do it yourself spirit, you can purchase your own easy-to-use spiral binding machine for less than $100 and make as many versions as you like, whenever you like, along with hundreds of other projects.

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Category: Home Management
Keywords: recipe book,spiral binding,different sections,book pages,recipe carefully,single recipe