I don’t want to have the dinner conversation and also want to leave a family heirloom to my kids. I decided I am making a DIY Family recipe book out of my old happy planner.
What do you want for dinner? I don’t know… what do YOU want for dinner?? I hate having that conversation every night. Either everything sounds good or nothing sounds good. Either way, we are in between a rock and hard place.
We also want to eat the same things all the time but also want to eat different things. So every year whenever I get the itch I will post on my social media pages for friends and family to send me their favorite recipes to try. If I love it I keep it. If I don’t I lose it forever. LOL
Why am I making a DIY Family recipe book?
Obviously for the reason above. The stupid dinner conversation… My mom also used to home cook everything. I barely remember eating out as a kid. Either she loved to cook so much or we were too broke to do it. Either way, my mom was always cooking. She did it all from memory. I wish I paid attention more to her recipes because she was an awesome cook. My sister knows some of them, but we have nothing concrete in front of us to reference. I should have asked my mom while she was still alive.
That is a good reason why. Food brings people together and I want my family to have those memories forever.
Getting organized
I have a bunch of cookbooks, printed recipes, and magazine pages ripped out of things I want to try. They were all over the place, but I recently put them all in a binder. I had the bright idea to write all of the recipes we love to eat on a regular basis in a notebook, but I didn’t like the idea of not being able to keep them in order.
Honestly, I have been overthinking waaaaayyyy too much. To the point, I almost don’t want to do it. But I love the idea of having a family recipe book to pass down from generation to generation. I want it a mix of handwritten and clippings filled with memories of when we cooked the recipe. You could say a memory scrapbook but with food.
I have been bouncing around using one of my many empty notebooks to using the binder they are all in right now. But of all the recipes I have, I don’t want to add them to the book until we have tried them. I wanted a way to organize them by group or just let it happen in order of what we make.
Classic Happy Planner
This is where the classic happy planner comes in to help make my DIY Family recipe book. I have had this happy planner for years and tried using it many times but it never seems to stick. So I decided I am going to use this classic happy planner as my DIY Family recipe book.
I thought using the classic happy planner as my recipe book would be a great idea to use up an old planner so it doesn’t just sit on my shelf collecting dust (since 2018) and gives me the option to put recipes in the order I make them or I can take the page out and use the dividers to separate them into categories.
This is great for the future if my kids want to make copies of the recipe book for their kids.
To cover the pages I will be using brown craft paper from Amazon packages that I have collected over the years to use in my journal. Plus I have a bunch of scrapbook paper that I can use to cover the pages. I also want to test painting over the pages with white paint.
I don’t want to spend money on making this. I am researching and using up things I have around the house to create this wonderful family heirloom.
Update
I wrote the section above 2 weeks ago. The craft paper I was going to use was too thin and ripped as soon as I used my crafter’s tape. I sat thinking about everything for a week. Wracking my brain.
I found someone in my area on Facebook Marketplace selling the happy planner mushroom hole punch for 25 dollars. I paid 15. Not bad considering they can be 40-50 bucks. I used some scrapbook paper and made my own pages which were cute and will definitely use them in the future… They just weren’t my jam right now. I didn’t feel that aesthetic.
What I found works best is cutting scrapbook paper to the size of the calendar of the happy planner and just gluing it in place. Once I write the recipe and decorate the page you can hardly tell a piece of paper is glued there.
Especially when you decorate the page with washi tape and stickers.
I do need to work on my recipe titles… LOL but it is what it is for now.
Things to include in my recipe book
As I said before I want this to be a scrapbook of love and memories. So when decorating each page I want to include anything and everything about that specific recipe.
Social media posts about the recipes we make. Sometimes we post on Facebook or Instagram. I want to include those posts by printing them out and including them on that page.
That and any memories that happened while making the recipe. When you are making the recipe yourself I want to include things that happened. So much that it almost kind of felt like you were there with us.
Tips and tricks that helped us with the recipe. Cooking terms etc…
I don’t really remember my mom or sister teaching me how to cook so I want it to also serve as a how-to guide. From basic recipes to complicated holiday recipes. I would have LOVED to have something like this from my mom but she wasn’t really into writing the recipes down.
Add to my recipe book
If you stumble upon this post and you want to recreate this yourself please share it with me on social media. I would love to see it. Also, I would love for you to share your favorite recipe with me by commenting it down below or shooting me an email at [email protected]. I will share a recipe back with you.
How cool would it be to share with my kiddos that a reader of my blog shared a recipe with me and we loved it so much it’s in the recipe book? Such a cool memory to share!!!!
Until next time, Have a great day! Remember you are a badass!
