Recipe scrapbooks remind you of good aromas!

You can almost smell and taste it...your mother's cooking. Recipe scrapbooks preserve your cherished food memories. Why do we even talk about "comfort food?" Isn't it because early on in our lives these foods took on more meaning than just something we chewed on? Keeping these memories alive is what recipe scrapbooking accomplishes!

Great food around the table

Growing up, eating great food around the table was always central to our family life. My mother was a wonderful southern cook and made great fried chicken, coleslaw and her famous Joan's pound cake! Because I wanted to remember those special moments and her delicious recipes, I digitally created a "mom's good cooking" photo book. In the album, I have not only her scanned in handwritten recipes, but photos of mom and her tasty dishes. I even have a picture of a dish dad made - because he also did some fine cooking when I was growing up. In the back of the book, my brother recounted memories of growing up eating mom's good cooking. I made a copy of the album for my brother as well as a copy for myself. That's the beauty of digital scrapbooking!

Making your own recipe albums

Like with many other scrapbooking themes, recipe scrapbooks offer you two different creation choices: traditional or digitally created scrapbooks. Either one gifts you with the same effect. So it comes down to questions such as...

• do I want to make duplicates for siblings or others?
• do I want to include the actual recipe in handwritten form or is scanning it good enough?
• how much shelf space do I have for the recipe scrapbook?
• what size do I want?
• etc.

Whichever way you choose to do your recipe photo story book, follow these and perhaps other steps you may include:

1. Find or take some photos of your favorite cook(s) and delicious dishes.
2. Collect your favorite recipes. Here you can rely on your own smell and taste memories, siblings family food favorites, family lore, recipes related to certain occasions or holidays, and other ways of identifying cherished foods. You may find these in a handwritten recipe book or on note cards. Use them as is, make copies or scan to use digitally.
3. Write down some of your own memories around food and specific dishes. Ask others in your family to do the same.
4. Organize your scrapbook around food types (comfort, entre, dessert, etc.) or another way that makes sense to you.
5. Create your scrapbook using traditional paper scrapbooking or digitally with software.
6. Find the kind of help you need with predesigned page templates for digital scrapbooks and albums for paper scrapbooking.
   
   
   
   

Now go eat one of your favorite foods! Mmm...