Hollie Coates

History 2710

Service Learning Project Report

For my Service Learning project this semester I did a family cookbook. I compiled a bunch of my family’s favorite recipes. I wanted to do this for the benefit of my family right now, but also for the future generations that will come. I used recipes from my grandma Roper, great-grandma Roper, grandma Billie, mom, and mother-in-law. I hope to hand this cookbook out to anyone in my family who wants it.

The intended audience of this project is my family. For years my mom and grandma have been saying that they wished that we had a cookbook with just our family recipes that was organized and handy. They were so excited when I told them I was going to do this. I hope to use these recipes to teach my children to cook, just like my family taught me. I think this will be better than searching through a disorganized box of recipe cards, and I hope that my family will find this helpful.

A good local contact person would probably be my mom. She lives in St. George and her phone number is 435-627-8135. She would be happy to answer any questions.

I worked on this project for around four hours per week for four weeks. First I had to get all of the recipes from every one. It actually took quite a bit longer to get all of the recipes from everyone than I thought it would, but I didn’t count that as time for the project. Then I had to go through and decide which ones I was going to use. That is what took me the longest. There were hundreds of recipes that I had never seen before. There were also a lot of recipes that I didn’t really think were anyone’s favorite. It was kind of difficult to decide which of them to use and which of them to discard. The next thing I did was to go through and organize them into 4 categories: appetizers & miscellaneous, breads, breakfasts, main dishes, and desserts. After I did that, I organized them into different sub-groups. For example, in the desserts I divided the recipes into cakes, cookies, brownies, pies, and miscellaneous desserts. Next I had to type everything up on my computer and print them off, which actually took quite a while. I started the cookbook on March 20 and I finished on April 16. I would work for about an hour on four days per week. It ended up taking me just over sixteen hours to complete the entire cookbook.

The only technology that was really used in this project was my computer. I typed the cookbook in Microsoft Word and printed it off of my home printer. I did get some pictures from my mom of her, my great-grandma, grandma Roper and grandma Billie to scan them onto my computer and put their pictures in the cookbook, but I couldn’t get my scanner to work for the life of me and it, obviously, didn’t work out in time.

I did not have many difficulties in doing this project. It was a little bit more time consuming than I thought it would be. I thought that I would have trouble getting it to take fifteen hours, but I hurried as fast as I could and it took over sixteen hours. The only little problem I ran into was with my mother-in-law, and it wasn’t even a really big deal. I asked her if I could get some recipes, preferably main dinner dishes, and she ended up only giving me dessert recipes. That is why she is only in the back of the cookbook. She also didn’t trust me to bring them back so we had to take them to a copy store to make copies of them, and It turned out that the copies were a little bit hard to read so I also had to call her a few times to make sure I understood them. Even then, her wording is a little bit different so those recipes are different than a lot of the other ones.

While going through all of these recipes I remembered a lot of things from my childhood. I would look at one recipe and think of a certain memory, such as baking Christmas cookies or cakes with my mom and grandma, decorating my birthday cakes, or waking up on Christmas morning and eating German pancakes and sausage and egg casserole. It was fun to remember all of the traditions that are associated with food in our family. On some of the recipes I put a (*) symbol and I explained the significance of that recipe to my family. For example, there are certain kinds of cookies that, for some reason, we only make around Christmas time, and some cakes that we only make for certain peoples’ birthdays.

I was amazed at how many recipes I received for this project. There were hundreds that I had to sort through. I relearned that the different sides of my family sometimes like different foods. On my dad’s side of the family we have homemade macaroni and cheese and sour kraut along with the normal things for Thanksgiving dinner, and on my mom’s side we have shrimp cocktail before dinner. Those are very different traditions on the different sides of my family. I had never really realized that difference. I also realized while doing this project that a lot of people in my family are very good cooks. My mother-in-law is a very good cook so I was disappointed that I didn’t get more of her recipes. I learned, and appreciate more, how much work goes into putting a cookbook together.

I am so excited that I had the opportunity to make this family cookbook! It will be so nice for us not to have to dig through a big box of unorganized recipe cards to find what we need, because the recipes that we use the most are now organized in a book. I sincerely hope that my entire family will use this cookbook and enjoy it!