My Finished Cookbook

The cookbook is all done! I had it printed through iPhoto and then it came back in full-colour glory!

 It is 98 pages long with an index I am proud of!

 And better than a scrapbook, it's a book I use everyday, not just a book sitting up on a shelf collecting dust. (How I hate dusty yet also hate things being dusty.)

Slow Cookbook-ing

Since finishing up all my quilts last year, I decided to take a little break from sewing. Mostly this is due to my more active baby coupled with the fact that my sewing room is deep in the basement, about as far away from everything as possible.

Instead, I started reading more. And I read Francine Jay's The Joy of Less. What an unbelievable book! I would recommend it to anyone who wants to streamline their life. So I started to purge and downsize and generally question why I have so many things in my life. And one of the things that I have a few of in my life is cookbooks.

We all have them: cookbooks we like for only one recipe. Cookbooks with nice photos. Cookbooks that we got as a gift from our husband on an overnight trip to Denver about quesadillas when we really just like our standard quesadilla recipe with the cheese and salsa. Okay, he's a great guy, but maybe not the best gift giver. I am very happy with him.

So we have these cookbooks, but if we were honest with ourselves, we know that we really only use a few recipes and can chuck the rest.

Enter "Slow Cookbook-ing."

I am compiling all my favourite recipes (about 100 including 50 dessert recipes!) into one book that I will then get printed off. It is a full colour monster and I am about half done. To finish it off, I am going to write the most awesome index in the world so I can find all the recipes that I want instead of flipping through my hodge-podge cookbook with the glued-in recipes that I currently have.

It's a dream that's becoming a reality. Very slowly. Especially with the kids. But I plug away at it everyday and I'm hoping to be done sometime before my birthday in February.

Happy 30th birthday to me!