Are you all getting tired of the cookbook updates yet?  I hope not, because I still have some blathering to do on that subject.

This week saw the reformatting of the book from 5.5 x 8.5 (in one incarnation, it was set up to be printed on plain paper and folded in half like a booklet, but it’s too thick for that now) to 6″ x 9″ trade paperback size, and finally to an 8.5″ x 11″ size.

I do like the trade paperback size better, for a cookbook, but by the time I got it all formatted nicely (I wanted to set it up so that recipes were not split across pages, which meant that mostly, it was one recipe to a page), it came out to 266 pages.  Which makes it a lot more expensive to print ($12/copy, spiral-bound, vs. the $8 I was estimating at 130 pages).

So at 8.5″ x 11″, I can get these printed and spiral bound at Lulu.com for about $10/each.  Or if I’m willing to go with their lower-quality paper and have them perfect bound (like a paperback), I can get them for around $6 each.  Since I’m planning to make gifts of these to family members and a few select friends, I’m anxious to keep costs down.

But while the perfect-bound certainly looks more professional, for a cookbook, I actually prefer spiral-bound.  Because that way, you can open it up to a specific recipe, and it will lay flat.

So we’ll see what I decide to do.  I’ve printed up a prototype, and it looks pretty good.  But I have a few last tweaks to make.  Beloved Husband points out (and rightly so) that my current format (title, ingredients, instructions, notes, source) makes it look like the source is the source of the comments, and not the source of the recipe.  So tomorrow, I’ll probably play with that a bit and see if I can come up with something that works without messing up my pagination.

Beloved Husband also pointed out a recipe that should be in the book and is not.  So now I have to see if I can find the recipe (I think the reason I hadn’t already added it is because I don’t have the recipe on any of the computers that are in the house; it’s probably on the old laptop, which is in the storage unit…someplace).

I did end up adding a few more recipes (like Mom’s Chicken Soup, and my Buffalo Wing recipe), because they seemed like ones that ought to be in there.  I also edited out a few more recipes, based on the guidelines posted here previously.  So the Chocolate Mousse recipe that has always sounded good, but which I never got around to making, has been deleted from the book and relegated to a different folder on my computer.  If I ever get around to trying it, and if it’s worth keeping, I can always add it back in easily enough.

And I’ve discovered that the hardest thing about working on a cookbook is that reading all of those recipes can make a person mighty hungry.  (Which is a bad idea when one is trying to diet…)

So that’s where my cookbook project stands for the time being.  More news as it happens!