It has been a thirty-year process, with the final month of work seeming like thirty years in itself (hm...kind of like pregnancy.). But I have a hardcover copy of my cookbook!
 |
| Look at that! Right there with my other cookbooks! |
When I was a cute, little newlywed...
I started collecting recipes and typing them up on my electric typewriter. I drew little pictures to go with some of the recipes, and put each thin, white page into a three-ring binder—with no page protectors. (Sadly, I don't have any of those original pages any more. Which is surprising to me, but they do seem to be gone forever.)
Years went by. I added more recipes—and added more. I bought page protectors; my binder got more and more full. I started copying the pages onto colored papers—White for Main Dishes, Green for sides, Pink for Desserts, and Yellow for Miscellaneous recipes. This made it easier to find each section of the book.
Later I retyped all of my recipes on the computer, and added more; my binder got bigger and bigger and bigger. Then, with my cookbook now saved on the computer, I decided to store my original pages in a very, very safe place. You know, a place where even I couldn't find them again.
In 2010 I drew new pictures for the divider pages, and colored them in Photoshop on my computer. It may have been at this point that I quit using colored pages for the recipes (it was getting hard to find colors that matched what I already had.)
 |
| Old vs. New. When I first started drawing these pages (in the dark ages) stripes were pretty trendy. But it was hard for a self-taught, Photoshop newbie to draw the diagonal stripes evenly; I had to give them up. |
 |
| You can see the colored pages behind the old dividers in the 3-ring binder. I did away with the little, scattered food pictures on each divider page. Those pages were all drawn by hand and colored with... ...Crayons! |
 |
| A lot of those little, bitty pictures made their way into the main body of the cookbook. I have to say, I do like the new, cleaner look a lot better. (Hmm. Why was the "Helpful Hints" page a "surprise"? I don't remember.) |
For my 25th anniversary I spent a year editing my cookbook. Man, it was a headache! At one point my computer decided that I had a corrupt file, and would delete the entire cookbook every time I worked on it. So I had to borrow Melanie's copy of my cookbook...
...OK. I'm not sure why I had to borrow Melanie's book, because I should have had the copy that I used every day. Hm.
Anyway, I borrowed Melanie's book, and retyped the entire thing, and jumped through a dozen hoops so that I could save it on two separate thumb-drives. At that time I'd also bought a wire-o binding machine (a craft one that I got for an entirely different project). So I got my pages printed professionally, and bound them myself. I even sold a few copies to friends and family (as a fund-raiser for Michael's mission).
 |
| the 25th Anniversary edition of Loralee's Cookbook, ©2015. |
And I announce that I was done. No more adding or editing recipes!
My family laughed at me for saying that; they had seen, for twenty-five years, that this book was a living, growing, work-in-progress.
And, sure enough, I typed up more recipes within a few weeks of publication, and I had to edit things like "heat oven to 35°" or "add 1/2 cinnamon". So I printed myself a newer copy in 2017. And then I was done. DONE!
Well, we all know how this turned out, don't we?
 |
| the 2017 edition of Loralee's Cookbook I created the super-cute endpapers, and even found a way to bind the whole thing all together. I took this picture today (01/20/2021). The book has broken apart from the outer cover. You can see how worn the pages are—it is the most used book in the house. And all those loose papers in the back? New recipes. |
Yes. In the intervening three years I started collecting more recipes. I typed them up and added them to the computer version of my cookbook. But, since my computer is in another room, I had to write or print the new recipes up when I wanted to use them. I couldn't add them to the existing book because the wire-o binding is permanent—it doesn't reopen. (Well, it would, but eventually it would break.) I would scribble recipes on Post-It notes and stick them to my cupboard doors. My kids found them a little aggravating because I didn't put the names of the recipes on the Post-Its. I didn't need to! I could tell what they were, and even how to prepare them, by reading the ingredient lists.
 |
| I took this picture on Jan. 21. These are some of the recipes I've collected over the last three years. |
 |
| Those are the recipes on the other side of the kitchen—the side I don't work at so much. (Maybe I should take all the Post-Its down now...) |
 |
| And these are some of the recipes I found when I organized my spice cupboard the other day. |
 |
| This is the very last page of the 2017 cookbook. The new, hardbound copy has 524 pages. |
But it is finished—no more additions or reprints! ;-)
