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How to Create Your Own Cookbook (Part II)
December 8, 2007 | by Heidi | Filed under Heidi's Favorites
About a year and a half ago I did this post about how to create your own cookbook. It focused on a few of the fun and exciting ways you could preserve, share, and organize recipes into your own cookbooks - do-it-yourself cookbooks. I highlighted a small sampling of the tools, services, and applications out there. As I mentioned in this original write-up, it's a brave new world on the publishing front, with new ways to share recipes (and the stories that go with them) emerging constantly. As a follow-up to that original post, today I want to highlight a powerful new service called TasteBook. TasteBook allows you to create custom, hardcover, cookbooks from the recipes you love. For example, have a look at the collection I pulled together using fifty of my favorite personal recipes from the past five years of 101 Cookbooks....
I was lucky to see a sneak peek of an early version of TasteBook months ago - nearly falling out of my chair when I saw how nice these custom books turned out. I remember thinking, wow, these guys are serious. The physical object I was holding in my hands combined lovely design sensibility with great production quality and a level of customization that I didn't think was possible. Well, maybe I though it was possible, but certainly not probable.
How customizable? Quite. Individual "TasteBooks" are designed so that many of the components of the book are up to you - from the name of your collection, to the cover image, to the recipes you choose (and the photographs associated with them). I love giving homemade, do-it-yourself gifts, and immediately thought of all the people and occasions where this would be perfect.
TasteBook works in a way that is similar in spirit to iTunes. You are able to add, edit, and organize all your recipes, and then have them produced into custom cookbooks. If you can use iTunes - using TasteBook won't be much of a stretch. You are simply dealing with recipes instead of music files.
As I mentioned above, you can jump start your TasteBook experience by selecting an existing collection of recipes, or you can start completely from scratch. Refer back to the 101 Cookbooks Collection, it will give you a sense of what you get for $34.95, and show you what is possible. I've pre-populated it with 50 recipes. You also get another 50 recipe credits to add your own favorite recipes. When making a TasteBook if you don’t use all 100 recipe credits right away, no problem - the credits for unused recipes can be used at anytime. Recipe cards pop in and out of the custom multi-ring binder, so updating and editing recipes is a cinch - and most importantly - non-commital. A good thing if recipes fall in and out of favor around your house as quickly as they do around mine.
Generally speaking, the process of making a TasteBook is straight-forward:
Choose recipes: Users collect recipes a number of different ways. You can enter recipes yourself, you can start with an existing collection, or you can access the huge database of recipes on the TasteBook site. This database includes 25,000+ Epicurious.com recipes as well as recipes from what will certainly be a growing number of other sources. For example, Elise from Simply Recipes is also populating the system with a huge number of her recipes, so be on the look out for those as well.
Design your TasteBook: Choose a cover image, create your title, and select or enter up to 100 recipes.
I'm going to continue to collaborate with TasteBook over the coming months to do fun things. Hopefully in the near future I'll be able to offer up custom chapter inserts for my recipe collection(s). I'll also be highlighting more recipe collections - or recipe "playlists" as I like like to think of them. And, as more and more of my favorite cooks, chefs, food bloggers, recipe writers, and journalists add their recipes to the TasteBook platform, I look forward to curating some of those into what I hope will be interesting and inspiring collections!
I should also mention the offer for free shipping (on two or more TasteBooks) ends tuesday December 13th in order to make it for Christmas delivery.
Maybe I'll host a contest as we head into to the New Year for the best TasteBooks made by 101 Cookbooks readers? Would anyone be interested in that? We could do categories like: most original, best single theme, most outrageous, etc. I could make a page on my site to highlight all your TasteBooks, or we could set up a gallery on Flickr?....Let me know what you think. Feel free to through out any other category ideas. In the meantime, I'll see what kind of prizes I might be able to wrangle up.
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Your Comments
Babeth said:How funny I just watched this week the demo video for tastebook. Thanks Heidi for the full explanation post:-)
Cheers
Thanks for the tip, Heidi. I've joined Tastebook and am having a wonderful time entering all the recipes from my tatty, falling-apart notebook.
Kristen said:This is ingenious -- thanks for the tip! I love that you can add new pages after the fact; I am constantly adding new favorites to our rotation.
I absolutely love Tastebook. It's going to be part of the gift for every wedding shower I attend from now on.... best idea I've seen in a long time.
Things are changing so quickly in the publishing world. Thanks for alerting us to this possibility. I like the iTunes similarity and the fact that you can possibly pull recipes from other collaborators. Please keep us posted on your project!
I wish I had known about this a couple months ago-- I already did all my Christmas shopping!
All these new possibilities of printing your own books are wonderful. I've not looked into Tastebook but I certainly will.
Oh wow. How awesome. I'm on my way over to look over your collection. I love the interwebs so very very much. I also wanted to mention that I have your Super Natural Cookbook and love it! The sweet potato spoonbread introduced me to shallots (how did I not know about them? I'm allergic to onions and have found that shallots are a nice accompaniment to extra garlic when onions are called for.)
Last year my husband and I made a cookbook for our families featuring our favorite Mexican recipes. It was so much fun but the actual completion of the book was difficult. We looked all over town for scrapbook covers and photoalbums to put it all together. We did finally find an acceptable alternative but wow! Tastebook would have been perfect! I will definitely keep them in mind. Thank you for the great info!
Thanks, Heidi. As a publisher and book designer, I see Tastebook as a wonderful opportunity for people to create their own cookbooks using an easy to following procedure. The final product really seems outstanding and for what you get, very reasonably priced. How far technology has taken us!
Perfect timing. My sons just mentioned at Thanksgiving that I should put together a book of our family favorites. This will be a perfect project for me!
btw: on both their 'wish lists' is your new book - after seeing mine, they drooled. Both cook, obviously! Sure makes for easy gift giving on my part!
Thanks for all your enthusiasm and incentives.
That site is awesome! Thanks for sharing!
I've been struggling with my vast recipe collection and haven't found a solution. Does anyone know what size Tastebook is? I've been scanning through the website and have probably overlooked it.
I saw this on Epicurious but didn't realize all the possibilities. This is really exciting. I think I might make a family history cookbook. Get aunts and mother and nieces to contribute recipes. I have some very old ones to show what the greatgrandmothers were doing over a wood stove. It would be great to add old family photos too. It looks like that would be possible. Another possibility -- my book club has been talking about doing a cookbook with all the things we've cooked over the years. Our favorites. This would be a great way to make that happen. But I think both of these projects are for next Christmas. Gathering the recipes over the next year.
hey there heidi -- here's another book publishing/printing service that is good for cookbooks, though maybe better for cookbook gifting as you can't keep customizing the book after it's bound and printed.
http://photos.blurb.com/create/book/cookbook
This is such great info! I've been planning with my two sisters to create a cookbook of all our favorite family recipes...since currently, they are all on random pieces of paper stuffed in other cookbooks and impossible to find when I'm craving something mom used to make. We have a list of about 50 and were looking for the right Web site to help us put it together. And I love the idea of a contest...we're in!
Hi Heidi,
I love your blog!
Seems like we are in the same world of preserving family recipes and stories. I wrote, illustrated, and published my own family cookbook,
A Fistful of Lentils: Syrian-Jewish Recipes From Grandma Fritzie's Kitchen a few years ago, and now teach teleconferencing seminars helping people to start and complete their cookbook project step-by-step. I will check out Tastebook, and recommend it to my students and clients!
Hi Heidi!
I just wanted to say thanks for the info about TasteBook. I recently received an email about it, but wasn't sure how great it would be. (It's hard to beat a 3-ringed binder stuffed with tons of recipes, ya know?) Anyway, based on your preview, I think I'm pretty much sold!
Also, at the risk of gushing too much, I wanted to let you know that I love your blog. I randomly found your Dad's garlic bread recipe a week ago, and made it over the weekend. (Yum!) Since then, I've run across a few of your cookbooks (first at Barnes and Nobel and then through a blog).
So, while I'm sorry to say that I'd never even heard of you before a week ago (no offense!) - it suddenly seems like your name keeps popping up everywhere!
I look forward to browsing through your blog - I just added it to my own site - & am really excited about checking out a couple of your cookbooks today!
Thanks for all of the inspiration :)
Hi Heidi,
On a recent trip to NY I managed to get your lovely book! Thanks for sharing this idea on making our own cookery books! As a once published author wanting for more and with the difficulty of printing another one -everybody wants to do television chefs only! this seems like a great opportunity for everybody to do an accessible and fun book! I shall try that.
Got the Moro East book as well a few weeks ago, and it is special because we live not too far from the action there, having been waiting for 5 years for an allotment plot ourselves and now with people concreting existing ones, that leaves little chance for urban gardeners, but at least it is nice that there is a legacy in recipes and a renewed interest in self sufficiency. Congratulations on the blog, I love it!
Sofia
www.fiestasofia.blogs.com/fiestasofia
www.fiestasofia.co.uk
** I am posting this again because I am not sure my previous post got to you, apologies!
Thanks, Heidi.
really good idea~
That is grrrreat!!! tks a lot for sharing :D
Heidi - I see that many of your lovely photos are used on the recipe pages of the tastebook. Can I upload my own photos of my own recipes too?? I notice that there is not a lot of questions answered unless you "join" Tastebook, including the pricing & fees etc.
How cool is this? I love your framing it in terms of iTunes. Interesting! Thanks for such an informative post.
I've been making my own cookbook compliations as xmas gifts for three years, formatting, illustrating the ingredients by hand, copying, punching & binding and it's been fun, but man is this glossy version way cooler looking! Makes me want to play all day on their website. Bummed to see in the posts that we can't upload our own pictures for our recipes. Hopefully they'll figure that out soon. Thanks for the link!
I'm going to stike that comment (to avoid confusion) - I saw she cross posted on Elise's site as well. When Tastebook originally launched you weren't able to upload your own photos, but now you can - it's a new feature. They will be rolling out other features in the future as well to allow for more and more customization.
Heidi- thanks for letting us know about this cool site! What a neat idea, especially for us food bloggers :)
Hi Heidi,
It sounds like you had a great experience with TasteBook. The company I work for also recently introduced Create-A-Cookbook with Allrecipes.com. You can choose from more than 40,000 online recipes and include your own, as well as the stories and the photographs that make the foods special if you like. Just another option to consider if you're interested ... http://allrecipes.com/features/more/createacookbook.aspx
Hi Ann,
Thanks for the link to Create-A-Cookbook service. I am familiar with the site and have gone through the process of constructing a book.
There were a couple things I really enjoy about the TasteBook service that aren't yet incorporated into C-A-C. I don't like having to download an entire PDF to preview my book, I prefer to be able to browse the book in my browser. I also like the "universal recipe box" spirit of TasteBook and the way (as a user) you aren't forced to maintain a recipe box associated with one website - for example: you can use your Epi recipe box if you like, but you aren't forced to on TasteBook. -h
I dont know About any Cookbooks. p/s help me to connect with you. How?
What a great idea, and this looks so professional! Thanks for alerting us to a great product- this would be a great gift!
This is absolutely brilliant! I've been using my blog as my "recipe book" and hopefully, in a year, I'll have enough posted to make "Volume 1", of many. I'm so excited to finally be able to "officially" record all of the family recipes that have been handed down. This definitely trumps the tiny pieces of paper my mom has saved for 50+ years.
How neat! I know what I will be giving for gifts in the future. What a great way to collect all of your recipes in a book. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for taking a look at Create-A-Cookbook Heidi, and for sharing your observations. Similar in some ways, and completely different in others, it will be interesting to see the types of books that users create with both applications!
Hi guys,
I have been a follower of this blog for the past year or so and just wanted to let everyone know that I recently have started my own blog based on food, recipes, daily culinary school adventures (i go to the cordon bleu) as well as healthy eating tips. Check it out if you want at:
www.eatliverun.wordpress.com
thanks!
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