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Homemade cookbook

Alacrity59

Wanting for wisdom
You can certainly do that.

When I was a kid if someone admired a recipe then sharing involved copying out the recipe on a recipe card. Cards were kept in small boxes sorted out by broad category.

It can get difficult to find a recipe in a collection in a bunch of handwritten books.
It can be a bit of a pain re-writing a recipe for someone you wish to share with.
 

Luc

"To Wiki or Not To Wiki, That's The Question".
Staff member
My mom uses the system that Mike mentioned. It's easy to miss one or sort it wrong

I have one from my grand-ma (handwritten) cookbook. My plan was to retype it as I don't believe it will survive for long. Also, I have to guess a few words
 
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Luc

"To Wiki or Not To Wiki, That's The Question".
Staff member
Bumping backup up an old thread.

This project is still "in progress".

I was able to make work the table of contents properly (like I want) and it will be good work-out as there's a lot of coding required.

I am still planning of using the above template.

What I was able to do is figure out how to use the index properly in Word.

Letmeexplain

Let say that I have a simple recipe

Title: Beef with Soy Sauce

Ingredients
Beef
Soy Sauce

Directions
Mix together and cook

From there, I will have a table of contents that will show a header called "Beef and Soy Sauce" dot dot dot, page 1 (or something).

Now, I would like to see that recipe under a category named Beef and another one named Soy Sauce.

I need to insert a field named XE to do either on the recipe or next to the ingredients. Beef and Soy Sauce will both have their own listing with whatever label I put in "Beef and Soy Sauce" here.

To make it show, I need to insert another field called "Index". That will make that code appear.

I will end up with

Table of contents
Beef and Soy Sauce.......... 1

Index
Beef
Beef and Soy Sauce 1
Soy Sauce
Beef and Soy Sauce 1

---------------------------

Now, anything left to do for me is to start populating my template and push the information into the word file with those tables. I mainly wrote the above information here to have a reminder on how to do it.
 
Awesome idea. When i left home a friend of the family gave me a 3 ring binder with a bunch of recipes and list of ingredients/spices to have on hand. Over the years I have expanded it (it is now several binders). Coincidentally, yesterday my wife and I went through them to toss recipes that we will never make again and we are marking several that will be reprinted and added into a 3 ring binder and given to my son when he graduates from college and (hopefully) moves out. Originally we sorted by type of food or major ingredient but we are trying a new system...

All the recipes are in a sheet protector and we remove them from the book while we are cooking. This year we will reinsert the recipe at the front of the book so the most used recipes will tend to be closer to the front while ones not made very often will drift back. Can't say if it is a good idea or not... but we are going to try it for awhile and if we don't like it we can try something else.

But I really like the idea of putting together a home made list of recipes and giving it out.

Ruckin.
 

Alacrity59

Wanting for wisdom
Luc, probably the same thing but I highlight the text I want and use the mark entry button under references. Word defaults to making the selected text the "Main" entry. I cut and past it into the subentry and then fill in the main entry with the category I want it to be under in the index. That's Greek.

Let's say I want a recipe for dinner rolls and a recipe for Naan to be under bread. Highlight dinner rolls and mark it. Fill in the main entry with Bread and the subentry with dinner rolls. Next highlight Naan and mark it. Fill in the main entry with Bread and the subentry with Naan.

Then when you create the index you get something like

Bread
. . dinner rolls, 1
. . Naan, 23
 

Luc

"To Wiki or Not To Wiki, That's The Question".
Staff member
So you are using MS Word still as the software portion?

Yes. The reason comes from an article on lifehacker. If the software is discontinued or stop working, then nothing works. A word document could always be converted to another software if word disappears
 

Luc

"To Wiki or Not To Wiki, That's The Question".
Staff member
Luc, probably the same thing but I highlight the text I want and use the mark entry button under references. Word defaults to making the selected text the "Main" entry. I cut and past it into the subentry and then fill in the main entry with the category I want it to be under in the index. That's Greek.

Let's say I want a recipe for dinner rolls and a recipe for Naan to be under bread. Highlight dinner rolls and mark it. Fill in the main entry with Bread and the subentry with dinner rolls. Next highlight Naan and mark it. Fill in the main entry with Bread and the subentry with Naan.

Then when you create the index you get something like

Bread
. . dinner rolls, 1
. . Naan, 23

Yes, that's the main idea

I need to fix some items and should be able to have a prototype
 

Luc

"To Wiki or Not To Wiki, That's The Question".
Staff member
Victory!

I can't upload a test file right now but it works quite well. I will start the slow conversion process to add all the recipes to my document. Eventually, I can print it and put it in a binder or something like that.
 

Alacrity59

Wanting for wisdom
Very nice.

If you want to get a bit fancier you can put the Cover, the TOC, in their own sections so that the page numbering for the contents starts with page 1.
 

kelbro

Alfred Spatchcock
Interesting. Looks nice. I just have a huge folder of Word files that I use. That folder is on my Google Drive, One Drive, and DropBox. I print one out while I'm cooking and then stash it in the cabinet with the other 'analog' recipes if I don't spill too much on it.

I'm not sure why I would want to organize them any further as the search function in all three sources works very well even within the documents. I can search for ingredients, cook types, etc...
 
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