The family recipe book — before the recipes are gone.
Every family has them: the hotdish nobody makes quite right, the pie crust that lives only in someone’s head. This project gets them out of heads and recipe boxes and into a printed book — while the people who know the secrets can still tell them.
CollectGet every version, even the messy ones
Start by typing recipes in exactly as you know them — shorthand, missing amounts and all. AI will ask the right questions to fill the gaps: "It says a knob of butter — roughly how much? What pan size did she use?" For handwritten cards, type what you can read and describe what you cannot.
The storiesA recipe book nobody puts down
The magic ingredient is the paragraph above each recipe: whose it was, when it appeared, the Thanksgiving it burned. Tell AI the story in your own rambling words and let it tighten it to three warm sentences that still sound like you.
AssembleFrom pile to book
Ask AI to organize everything into sections (suppers, breads, holidays, "church basement classics"), write the table of contents, and suggest which family photos to scatter through it. Then the same print-on-demand route as the Life Story series: upload, order a copy for every household, done before Christmas.
Email cousins for their must-have recipes. People who never reply to anything reply to this — and every contribution is one more person who wants the book.
Your turn
Start with the crown jewel:
- Type in THE recipe — the one everyone asks for.
- Let AI interview you until it is complete and clear.
- Add its three-sentence story. One down.
What you can do now
- Turn shorthand and memory into complete recipes
- Capture the story behind each dish
- Organize a full book with sections and contents
- Print copies the family will fight over