Arrange your cookbook as artfully as these ingredients.
Even in an age when the Internet delivers recipes instantly with the touch of your fingers, cookbooks deliver a certain homey-ness and personal touch. When assembling your own collection of personally-vetted recipes, the choice of organize them into an easy-to-navigate order is essential for readability. Organize your cookbook according to types of recipes you have and their connecting theme.
Instructions
1. Make a list of all the recipes you've decided to include, using short titles of each dish. Try to include them all on a single page, using multiple columns if need be, so that you can look at the page and see all of the recipes at once.
2. Determine a theme for your cookbook, if you have not done so. Look at the recipes you want to include and see if they have any obvious connection or commonality that you can draw, such as ethnicity (or a mix of ethnicities), ingredients, methods of cooking, or difficulty of cooking. If you can't find an obvious theme, come up with your own central reason for including the recipes related to your journey as a cook, such as recipes your mother taught you or recipes you learned for your family. Your theme will help you determine arrange your recipes.
3. Format your recipes. Organize them with a short introduction (in which you describe the dish to be cooked), followed by a list of the ingredients and items needed for the recipe, followed by step-by-step instructions. Do this with every recipe.
4. Divide the recipes into categories. The most common categories for cookbooks are based on where the food fits into a meal, giving one category each for things like appetizers, soups, salads, main dishes, side dishes and desserts. You might also arrange the recipes by which meal the foods are best for (i.e., breakfast, lunch or dinner), or by difficulty level.
5. Place the recipes in order within the categories. This order can be whatever you like, but if you have quite a few recipes in each category, consider placing them in alphabetical order to make them easy to find.
6. Determine an order for the categories. If using parts of a meal as categories, place them in the order in which they're eaten: appetizer, soup, salad, side dish, main dish and dessert. If using other types of categories, put them in whatever order you like.
Tags: your cookbook, your recipes