Grandma’s Cookbook

If you know one thing about me, you probably know 100, but here’s another tidbit of information about yours truly… I love cookbooks. Yes, it is a fact that I absolutely LOVE cookbooks. I swear, I have a cookbook addiction. Some days I think it’s a bad thing and other days I absolutely love it. The funny thing is, you can probably find any and every recipe you want on line these days, yet I want those hard cover cookbooks. It’s just the thing that I need to have. I love the feel of the paper and the weight and having it right there all spelled out for you. I get frustrated when I get flour on my computer or my iPad goes to sleep before I’m done following a recipe.

Why do I bring this up? Well, for Christmas last year my grandma gave me a present I truly cherish. She compiled a bunch of her favorite recipes into a small three ring binder. All the recipes are in protective pages so I can pull them out if I need, but are easily cleanable should I get stuff on them. And best yet, a lot of them are in her handwriting.

Jump forward a couple months and she went into the Church to give pie crust making lessons. I don’t really know all the details, but I just know that a bunch of the ladies in her church wanted her pie crust recipe and wanted to learn the lessons from her. My Christmas present is a copy of one she made herself. When the ladies at the church saw this cookbook, they wanted one too. That’s when, Grandma’s Cookbook was created.

DiggyPod

The ladies at the church convinced grandma to publish her cookbook. Grandma did research looking for a book publishing company local as well as far off. Basically she wanted the best deal, who doesn’t right? She went with a company she found on line called DiggyPod. The ladies at the church wanted all the recipes in Grandma’s handwriting, so that’s where I came in. She modified her cookbook a bit from the one she gave me for Christmas.

I took her cookbook, scanned each page in, and then placed it in their document. Then I sent it off for her to be published. My only one true complaint about the company as a whole was I received an email with 3 small problems. Easy fixes. But the one stood out in my head as weird. So the cover of the book wasn’t as high of quality as they wanted. It was 12 dpi off from what they suggested for printing so it might look a little grainy if I didn’t get it higher. No big deal… until they wanted to charge me $40 if I were to resend the file. Wait, what? The only complaint about the quality of the book as a whole would cause me $40 to fix.

Not trying to be a know it all or anything, but the photo was a printed photo from the late 80’s or early 90’s and at 12 dpi, you’re really not going to notice a difference. So I told them I think I’ll keep the $40, and I’m glad I did. I saw the finished product and you’d never know that was an issue.

Grandma’s Cookbook

So now Grandma has a published cookbook. She’s selling it and donating the proceeds to her church mission fund. I might be a bit envious. One of my goals in life is to be a published author. I want to write a book book (novel) and a cookbook.

When the books arrived, she asked if I wanted one. I laughed and told her to sell mine for more money because I was lucky enough for an original. She said that she changed it up a bit. I told her I could go through the scanned version, get the recipes added I needed and I’d be good to go. She did set back a copy for Abug and Tbug. I won’t let them have theirs until they are older though.

So, who wants a copy? Any takers 🙂 When they are gone, they are gone… but she may print more, who knows.