Book Report - 'Hennett Family Cookbook' by Jake Hennett
After years of cooking, trying new recipes, tweaking those recipes to make them my own, and aggregating them into a collection, I want to make a cookbook.
When my wife and I first got together, neither of us could really cook. We subsisted on ramen noodles and frozen chicken strips for the most part. Over time, we started branching out with new recipes we found online. The first few met with inconsistent success, but we got better and better as we learned new skills. Now, I can throw together ingredients on the fly and make something decent most of the time. Recipes are more suggestions and riffs on a theme, rather than explicit instructions for me.
A little while back, I considered that it might be nice to have a physical book printed from our recipe cards. Keeping a laptop in the kitchen to read a recipe from works, but I realize there's some inherent risk with it. We've gotten flour, grease, and all kinds of kitchen detritus on our devices, and I know that one day this could severely damage the laptop. It would be nice to enter and edit recipes in a clean and controlled setting, but have a physical book to read from while we're cooking. If the book got damaged, the original recipes would still be safely tucked away in digital, and I could use something like Barnes & Noble's Print-On-Demand service to just print another. I could even give them out as gifts.
Rather than copy and paste individual Google Docs into a collective file, I determined some other format would probably be better if I planned on printing the recipes in bulk. Formatting would be similar across all recipes created from that template file, but what if the spacing was off between recipes? What if the aspect ratio of the template didn't match the physical book dimensions? What if I wanted to change the book dimensions for a second edition? I'd have to go through and change dozens or hundreds of recipes individually.
I had recently started using Obsidian to create a personal knowledge base in markdown format. Markdown was still new to me, but it seemed to offer the sort of structure and consistency that would be perfect for storing recipes in a format to print in bulk later. I created a new Obsidian vault, added it to a public repository on GitHub, and built out a template to use.
We had a ton of recipes in Google Drive, and obviously converting each of these files over to a markdown format was going to be a lot of work. Instead, I started taking a few at a time to convert, mostly chosen as I made that dish again. Any new recipes that we found online and wanted to make a card for, I tried to add to both Google Drive and Obsidian, but they would AT LEAST go into Obsidian.
Because photos of food are what really draw you to a new recipe at first, I started making a point to take pictures of food that I cooked when I remembered. I saved those to a Google Photos album. This would allow me to then link individual photos to their respective recipes. Perhaps I couldn't dynamically generate photo pages to complement the recipe pages, but I would at least have the appropriate photo available at the click of a button. I even took a photo of one of our cast iron pans to serve as the cover page!
As I played around with a handful of recipes in Obsidian (rather than waiting until I had tons and spend forever updating ALL of them), I learned some of the benefits of tags. One huge problem we have with recipes in Google Drive is the lack of effective searching and sorting. Sure, I can search for particular ingredients or titles, but I can't filter to certain criteria. I've added all currently used tags to the template file, and each new recipe gets that tag list pared down to only what is relevant. This allows me to select a tag and only view recipes with that particular tag.
How does this help? Say I want to make a crock pot dish. I try to use "crockpot" in the title most of the time, but I also try to match the original name from the source we found it and they often use the term "slow cooker." I could search for either, but I'm not guaranteed an exhaustive list. Instead, I name the files whatever in Obsidian, but ensure that I add a tag for Crockpot. Then, if I want to find a crockpot recipe, I simply search for that tag and it lists all associated recipes. Easy!
This also makes it super easy to find recipes with what I have available. Say the only meat we have thawed is ground beef. Well, I've fortunately added ground beef tags to those recipes. Search for that tag and boom, here are recipes that use ground beef. I can skim over the list of recipes and decide quickly which one I actually want to make.
Alas, this doesn't help with a physical book if I were to print it. Or does it? I could add a table of contents with categories for those tags. If I want to get real fancy, I could also add an index at the end with categorical lists, so that each recipe might be present multiple times in different categories (a chicken dish made in a crockpot) without having to print the same recipe on multiple pages. There are SO many things I could do to make the information more accessible.
The problem I'm facing now is how to get the recipes formatted in an attractive format automatically, without creating new recipes in HTML. I love the simplicity of markdown for listing ingredients and steps, but the resulting document isn't exactly pretty. The first time I sent the GitHub link for a recipe to my wife, she definitely complained about the way it looked (justifiably so). I understand you can add formatting, but I want something that can automatically consume my markdown files and apply CSS that I create to generate consistently formatted documents that mimic that Google Drive template we used previously.
What I'm envisioning is pretty simple, at least for the first iteration. For each recipe, I want the image on one page with the actual recipe opposite, much like "Big Little Recipes." As much as I would love to have the sorted table of contents with the index at the end, that can come with a second edition. I really think that first print will open the floodgates to what all I can do with rendering our favorite recipes in a physical format.
For now, I would love to get the recipes in a web-viewable format that keeps the formatting from Google Drive, but the tags and organization of Obsidian. Sure, I could set my wife up with Obsidian on her end and link it to the GitHub repository, but that's a ton of work and I don't think she would be on board with that. She wants to be able to open a website, search for a recipe, and read it in a nice UI.
Sure, I COULD make a single page application as a viewer for all this, but then I would have to handle hosting and all that jazz (can you host locally?). Ideally, I wanted to stick with just reading directly from the GitHub repo, but it doesn't seem like you can apply the HTML formatting when viewing code. Realistically, it makes sense. GitHub never suggested they would host your website for you, they just make it where you can push your code up to a remote repo.
Hopefully, in a few months I can cover the first edition of the Hennett Family Cookbook. For now, it's just an idea and some markdown files. Once I sus out a few more details, I should be able to throw twenty bucks at Barnes & Noble and get something physical to play around with and figure out where I can make improvements. In another year or two, maybe my first published cookbook will be on shelves somewhere near you.
For a long time, we've been collecting those recipes on Google Drive. We stuck them in a folder shared between us, so we would know where to look when we needed to decide what to cook for dinner. I grabbed a template and created a document to copy from when we want to make a new recipe card. We've been at it for years and this system has worked really well for a long time.
A little while back, I considered that it might be nice to have a physical book printed from our recipe cards. Keeping a laptop in the kitchen to read a recipe from works, but I realize there's some inherent risk with it. We've gotten flour, grease, and all kinds of kitchen detritus on our devices, and I know that one day this could severely damage the laptop. It would be nice to enter and edit recipes in a clean and controlled setting, but have a physical book to read from while we're cooking. If the book got damaged, the original recipes would still be safely tucked away in digital, and I could use something like Barnes & Noble's Print-On-Demand service to just print another. I could even give them out as gifts.
Rather than copy and paste individual Google Docs into a collective file, I determined some other format would probably be better if I planned on printing the recipes in bulk. Formatting would be similar across all recipes created from that template file, but what if the spacing was off between recipes? What if the aspect ratio of the template didn't match the physical book dimensions? What if I wanted to change the book dimensions for a second edition? I'd have to go through and change dozens or hundreds of recipes individually.
I had recently started using Obsidian to create a personal knowledge base in markdown format. Markdown was still new to me, but it seemed to offer the sort of structure and consistency that would be perfect for storing recipes in a format to print in bulk later. I created a new Obsidian vault, added it to a public repository on GitHub, and built out a template to use.
We had a ton of recipes in Google Drive, and obviously converting each of these files over to a markdown format was going to be a lot of work. Instead, I started taking a few at a time to convert, mostly chosen as I made that dish again. Any new recipes that we found online and wanted to make a card for, I tried to add to both Google Drive and Obsidian, but they would AT LEAST go into Obsidian.
Because photos of food are what really draw you to a new recipe at first, I started making a point to take pictures of food that I cooked when I remembered. I saved those to a Google Photos album. This would allow me to then link individual photos to their respective recipes. Perhaps I couldn't dynamically generate photo pages to complement the recipe pages, but I would at least have the appropriate photo available at the click of a button. I even took a photo of one of our cast iron pans to serve as the cover page!
As I played around with a handful of recipes in Obsidian (rather than waiting until I had tons and spend forever updating ALL of them), I learned some of the benefits of tags. One huge problem we have with recipes in Google Drive is the lack of effective searching and sorting. Sure, I can search for particular ingredients or titles, but I can't filter to certain criteria. I've added all currently used tags to the template file, and each new recipe gets that tag list pared down to only what is relevant. This allows me to select a tag and only view recipes with that particular tag.
How does this help? Say I want to make a crock pot dish. I try to use "crockpot" in the title most of the time, but I also try to match the original name from the source we found it and they often use the term "slow cooker." I could search for either, but I'm not guaranteed an exhaustive list. Instead, I name the files whatever in Obsidian, but ensure that I add a tag for Crockpot. Then, if I want to find a crockpot recipe, I simply search for that tag and it lists all associated recipes. Easy!
This also makes it super easy to find recipes with what I have available. Say the only meat we have thawed is ground beef. Well, I've fortunately added ground beef tags to those recipes. Search for that tag and boom, here are recipes that use ground beef. I can skim over the list of recipes and decide quickly which one I actually want to make.
Alas, this doesn't help with a physical book if I were to print it. Or does it? I could add a table of contents with categories for those tags. If I want to get real fancy, I could also add an index at the end with categorical lists, so that each recipe might be present multiple times in different categories (a chicken dish made in a crockpot) without having to print the same recipe on multiple pages. There are SO many things I could do to make the information more accessible.
The problem I'm facing now is how to get the recipes formatted in an attractive format automatically, without creating new recipes in HTML. I love the simplicity of markdown for listing ingredients and steps, but the resulting document isn't exactly pretty. The first time I sent the GitHub link for a recipe to my wife, she definitely complained about the way it looked (justifiably so). I understand you can add formatting, but I want something that can automatically consume my markdown files and apply CSS that I create to generate consistently formatted documents that mimic that Google Drive template we used previously.
What I'm envisioning is pretty simple, at least for the first iteration. For each recipe, I want the image on one page with the actual recipe opposite, much like "Big Little Recipes." As much as I would love to have the sorted table of contents with the index at the end, that can come with a second edition. I really think that first print will open the floodgates to what all I can do with rendering our favorite recipes in a physical format.
For now, I would love to get the recipes in a web-viewable format that keeps the formatting from Google Drive, but the tags and organization of Obsidian. Sure, I could set my wife up with Obsidian on her end and link it to the GitHub repository, but that's a ton of work and I don't think she would be on board with that. She wants to be able to open a website, search for a recipe, and read it in a nice UI.
Sure, I COULD make a single page application as a viewer for all this, but then I would have to handle hosting and all that jazz (can you host locally?). Ideally, I wanted to stick with just reading directly from the GitHub repo, but it doesn't seem like you can apply the HTML formatting when viewing code. Realistically, it makes sense. GitHub never suggested they would host your website for you, they just make it where you can push your code up to a remote repo.
Hopefully, in a few months I can cover the first edition of the Hennett Family Cookbook. For now, it's just an idea and some markdown files. Once I sus out a few more details, I should be able to throw twenty bucks at Barnes & Noble and get something physical to play around with and figure out where I can make improvements. In another year or two, maybe my first published cookbook will be on shelves somewhere near you.
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