Tastebooks For Everyone

photo: Tastebook

Now that Christmas has come and gone, I can tell you about what I got my family for the holidays. Cookbooks filled with family recipes!

I used Tastebook to compile my own family recipes online, and had them printed in an (almost) professional quality collection. You can also make a cookbook super-quick by searching over 100,000 recipes from some of Tastebook's partners -- like Epicurious and Bon Appétit -- or buy premade recipe collections (kinda lame, since it's so easy to make your own), or even share your personal recipes online. Tastebook has great videos on how it all works, but I'll run through some things and give opinions on the whole deal.

First, I'll say that using Tastebook is easy. If for any reason you should use Tastebook, it's because it's easy.

I started editing a butt-load of family recipes my Dad sent me a couple of years ago, in the hopes of one day presenting a printed cookbook to my family. Originally, I was going to use Lulu, an online publisher, but after painstakingly editing the recipes (my Dad makes some crazy-ass sentences), I tried to upload to Lulu, and got some error/incompatibility message. Being the computer tard I am, I said, "Oh, hell no. I ain't dealing with that shit."

Tastebook was launched after I started my recipe editing project, and I had bookmarked it as a possibility, so just jumped over there and shortly found myself cutting and pasting the recipes into Tastebook's templates. Lord love the template. So Easy.

There are sections in the template to put a title, story or lead-in, ingredient list, cooking directions, yields, prep time, total time, tags, notes, and even upload a picture. I didn't use all of these sections, but, I'll reiterate, usage is easy.

When you're ready to have the book printed (holds up to 100 recipes, but you can buy 100, 50, or 25 recipes, and receive credits for future recipes if you have less than the number you ordered printed), you pick a cover (can't upload a personal picture for this), title your masterpiece, and they ship it to you in about two weeks after you place the order.For the holidays, you get a cookbook neatly wrapped in matte paper with a sticker on the outside saying "Specially prepared for [ the name of the person who made the cookbook ] deliciously yours, Tastebook." That's sweet, but I'm giving these as gifts to other people, and it looks like it's a gift to me. This sticker can be carefully peeled off with little to no ripping of the wrapping, though, and there's a peel-and-press strip on the underside of the wrapping flap for you to secure the flap.
And here's the book out of the wrapper. I chose the cover photo from their stock photo options (they seem to constantly add more...and some go missing if they're out of stock), the name of the book (so original!), the font color, and the spine color. What you can't see from the picture is that the rectangular cover title and spine title are not actually part of the book, but stuck on. In person, the cover title is not that obviously stuck on, but the spine title is. A little cheap, but that's how they can produce tons of these things and make it "personalized."
This is the back of the book. I'm not fond of Tastebook's blabbering self-promotion and random photos on the back cover that have nothing to do with my cookbook . There's also a tiny tastebook.com plastered at the bottom of each recipe page, but I guess that's the price you pay for creating a cookbook so easily.
Your recipes are bundled together with a little letter explaining how you have to put the recipes in their respective tabbed chapters. You cannot upload a personal photo for the tabbed section dividers. Options are nice, and I thought I wanted this option, but it was nice to have their photos...because I just don't have any great pics of fish!
Here's where your uploaded personal photos can go -- on your recipe page. The recipe pages are glossy, and the printing is nice.
There's one of these measurement equivalent pages, too.

And that's it! My experience with Tastebook was easy and pleasurable, and the cookbooks look nice. I'm not fond of Tastebook's branding throughout the book, but if you've got a slew of recipes you've been meaning to compile in a book, but the task is too daunting, try Tastebook. It still took me a year to compile the book -- a recipe here, a recipe there, no recipes in the summer -- but it's done!