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My best potato salad recipe inspired by Family Cookbook Project – do you have all your recipes orderly organised and filed? I thought not!
Recipe chaos
One of the reasons why I started my blog and website was to introduce some order into my recipe collection. A drawer full of magazine clippings (yes, that’s how far back we go!) stamp-sized scraps of paper with cryptic scribblings, post-it notes and printouts of online stuff. Any attempt to tidy it up, collate by theme and ring-bind would only last for a few weeks until chaos took rule again.
I also struggled with my own recipes. ‘Do I egg-wash honey buns?’, I’d ask The Weather Man and receive a blank expression in reply. I’d scroll through notes apps on my phone, dead certain (though wrong) I’d made a note of precisely how long to roast a chicken for best results. I’d text my daughter to find out if the Yorkshire pudding mix needed to chill in the fridge and when did we usually bake the sponge for Christmas yule log.
Lost family recipes
That’s all before I lamented the fact that I never asked my Mum, let alone my Grandma who was the cook extraordinaire, for the family recipes for Buchteln, potato knishes and pork terrine among hundreds of other dishes. And the fact that through moving houses and countries I don’t have boxes of stuff that belonged to grandparents stored in my attic.
What is Family Cookbook Project?
Before you worry, I don’t propose that every home cook launches a blog to preserve their recipes – heaven knows there is enough competition out there already. No, there is a much simpler solution: Family Cookbook Project.
FamilyCookbookProject.co.uk is a web-based tool to help create your own, printed personalised cookbook. It is incredibly easy to use, it is fun and it can be shared between several family members or friends. If you want an individually designed hard copy, all you need is to pick a theme, design your layout choosing from hundreds of styles, upload your own images or use the wealthy FCBP image library and order as many copies as you wish.
No more clutter, no more cryptic notes or crumbling notebooks with faded handwriting – though the latter must surely be preserved as mementos. You will be able to access any of your uploaded or shared recipes on your devices, including a phone app, in addition to your physical book.
What else does Family Cookbook offer?
If you invite others to be contributors, you can have your own cooking club – who says only books are worth discussing with friends? There is space for your own comments or stories behind recipes that you’d like to share or save for the next generations.
And just imagine your Mum or Grandma’s expression when presented with a colourful book of their own treasured recipes, with pictured, stories and comments, for their birthday or Mother’s Day! I can hardly imagine a lovelier gift, or a fundraising prop.
Easy and versatile
The software is highly intuitive, you need not be a techie in the slightest, so users of any age will find it easy to create their cookbooks or contribute to shared ones. It has the facility for importing recipes from popular websites too, so no more trawling the Internet for ‘Nigella lemon cake’. Once you’ve found, tried or tested a recipe you like, simply import it into your Family Cookbook.
The Premium Membership with unlimited contributors and recipes, premium graphics, customisable layouts and Kindle format export among others, could be a fantastic gift for a Friend Who Cooks.
What’s special about this potato salad?
My potato salad is one of the recipes that I and my daughter periodically contact each other about, asking all kinds of questions: how many gherkins? do we add garlic? mayo, yoghurt or both? For both of us it will be now preserved on Cuisine Fiend. But I’m thinking of making personalised Cookbooks for people I love, filled with my selected recipes they are particularly fond of.
The potato salad might be one of the easiest dishes in the world but I find it varies from cook to cook tremendously. The bowls of potato dice drowned in mayo and heavy with chopped egg are definitely not my idea of potato salad. Immodestly, I consider my version absolutely the best because it is light, fresh, spring-like even in the middle of winter and unbelievably tasty.
It’s the right ingredients
The ingredients are just right: a crunch from radish, sweet and sourness from the gherkins, sharp spring onions, fresh herbs and the dressing of mayonnaise lightened with Greek yoghurt.
Of course, a lot depends on the potato variety. New potatoes but not baby-sized, waxy and firm, Charlotte variety or similar, will be the best. I boil them in their skins and satisfyingly easy peel the skins when they have cooled down a bit. It’s a good idea to drizzle them immediately with some olive oil, it makes tossing the finished salad much easier.
Try my salad for yourself - and by all means go to the Family Cookbook Project to see for yourself how easy, useful and enjoyable it is!