Monday 22 March 2010

Cooking the books: how to use a cookbook

My grandma is a garage sale fiend. When I was home a few years ago she scored me this:


It's a Creative Cooking Encyclopedia a la 1984, and it's got some cracking recipes.


I lugged that thing back to Birmingham, then on to the Crouch End flat and the Ravenscourt Park flat in London. It was pretty big, I mean, 2000 recipes!

When Dan and I started packing to leave England we were vicious. It costs a fortune to ship stuff and with books, it's usually cheaper to just buy them again when you get to America. Sad but true. Since this Creative Cooking Encyclopedia took about a 1/3 of my baggage allowance, I knew it was time to say good-bye. But my crafty side put up a fight - there's some great pictures in there, so much potential!

I knew this was true. I love paper products, way more than I love cooking. So before we left I filleted that book for as many great pages as I could, especially in the dessert, cocktail, mousse, and casserole sections. Nothing like a good 1984 frankfurter casserole.

I've come up with three uses for the recipe pages.

1. Envelopes.


2. Book covers. Whack some contact paper on them. Great for journals or idea books.



3. Wrapping paper. I wrapped most of our Christmas presents in this. Dan's mum even saved her Florentine recipe gift wrap and filed it in the recipe cupboard. It's like a double gift: a pressie and a recipe. (Sorry, no photo for this one, but I still wanted to throw it in there.)

So, that's what I do with cookbooks anyway. Strip them down and use them for my crafty ways.

Have you been up to anything crafty recently? Feel free to send a link for a bit of show and tell.

5 comments:

La Dolce Vita said...

Ely had the same crafty idea, but she used magazines and fashion catalogs! :)

alisha said...

Ooh, good stuff. I used to use old National Geographics which was cool. I'd love to get my hands on some more!

Nadine said...

OMG, I absolutely love these ideas! They don't recycle magazines here on the islands (grr, don't get me started) so I always keep whatever magazines we have. They're making a large pile in the garage but I love the idea of making them into envelopes and gift wrapping! Thank you so much for the ideas!

alisha said...

Nadine, glad I could give you a use for your magazine pile! :)

Jessica said...

That's so funny! I was going to post on what to do with used magazines... we're on the same page love!:) I'll have to link to your blog when I post mine!

Love the book/journal cover idea!

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