I am so excited to share today about the most special Cook’n cookbook I have ever created. I am just sitting here watching my blonde, curly-haired blondie read a recipe from this special book to make my mom’s famous breadstick. It is so touching and brings tears to my eyes. I have had the physical copy since Christmas and just adore having these special recipes at my fingertips to flip through now. I also know that I can hop right on my phone and access them digitally, which is so incredible!

I told you over a year ago that my mom, sisters and I were working on compiling recipes that are so special to our family. My mom’s mom made a cookbook for all her kids in the 1990’s that compiled all her mom’s special recipes, as well as her own. My mom comes from a long line of incredible cooks, before there was Pinterest or internet reviews so that any Joe Schmoe can turn out a decent meal, knowing he’s starting with a five-star recipe. Cooking delicious meals just seemed to be in their bones, something they intuitively knew how to do with tons of practice and learning.

My grandma grew up in a family in Arkansas with 10 kids in the family on one income, and her mom really knew how to cook cheaply with staples from the pantry and make it stretch to feed 12 hungry mouths each day.

These women are all from the South, so there are so many recipes that admittedly I will likely never make --things like collard greens and black-eyed peas--but are fun to read about and read the stories behind them. You see, my grandma put a special story on almost every recipe for what occasions she loves making the recipe, or who in the family absolutely loves or hates it. Her voice really comes through in the descriptions and that is what I cherish most about it. After she passes, her voice will live on and pass on to the next generation with this cherished book.

My grandma made a physical copy and typed up each of these recipes and gave copies of her special cookbook, called “One Cupp Full” to a lot of my older siblings and cousins when they got married. I’m the sixth of eight children, and by the time I got married, my grandma didn’t have the energy to continue making these physical books anymore. I am so thrilled that I got to tell my family members about scanning in her recipes and compiling the recipes in the Cook’n software and app and because of this, we have easily compiled over 500 recipes to digitize and remake this cherished book that we can print out any time we need to with ease.

In the picture above, for the back cover of our book, we decided to show some of the various cookbook covers she made for different family members.

We decided to capture each recipe in the app by taking a photo of it and it “magically” captures all the words, the correct measurements and ingredients and even photos, if there are any. It is incredible that it can even do this for handwritten recipes. I truly LOVE this software and am so amazed that Dan came up with this incredible technology! He is a true tech wiz!

I would highly encourage anyone to compile special family recipes and create a cookbook that you can share with any and all family members you’d like. It is well worth the time and the Cook’n software and app help you make a task--like in my case, digitizing over 500 recipes--fast and simple. It is so incredible to be able to hold this special book in my hands and physically flip through the recipes. It also gives me great joy and peace of mind to know these are all safely stored online and will never have to be inputted again!