Going through Jeri's old posts and the many messages we sent each other over the years caused me to revisit the recipes I posted as Kitchentales.

I just finished a 280 page cookbook, 1500 recipes, got it printed up as a wedding gift, and forgot to take a look here for inspiration.

I have a Filemaker Pro database to keep track of my recipes - 10,500 of them - and narrowed the favorites down for that cookbook. It took a long time to get it done because my goal was to not have a lot of white space.

The primary goal for this cookbook was to have a hard copy reference to use in my kitchen. Before, I would find a recipe in my database and jot the ingredients on the back of a used envelope to bring into the kitchen. My kitchen is very small, and bringing the laptop in there is not ideal.

I was just about ready to pull the trigger when I realized I needed to have the various sections (Appetizers, Soups, Poultry, Pies, etc.) start cleanly so I could use tabs to organize it better.

It has an index, and it took a lot of time to tweak the codes to come up with somewhat of a logical organization without too much redundancy.

The cookbook is a Word document. I looked at those church cookbook publishers, but they required the recipes be formatted differently, and sometimes directly typed into their portal, one recipe at a time. And would only do about 1/3 of the recipes I was wanting to publish. There is a minimum number of books required, so publishing would cost about $1000.

I don't doubt that I could sell cookbooks, and the church type would be priced to sell. It cost about $35 each to print my final product and have it bound with a spiral wire binding. I doubt many people would pay that much, and I don't really care about peddling cookbooks.

I didn't get it done in time to send to Jeri - she said she was looking forward to it for the inspiration. What to cook for dinner was always a big topic between us. At the point I had a draft, she was no longer in contact with me. I'm sure if I'd sent it, her family would not have given it to her.

And now that it's done, I've already started on the 2024 Supplement.