Turn Your Recipes into a Memory Book

One woman’s kitchen chaos launched a business.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could hand off the whole pile of cards, clippings, and dog-eared cookbook recipes to someone and let them deal with organizing it? Asks writer Joyce Saenz Harris.

Well, you can delegate your culinary chaos to Debby Barney, says Harris.

“In her day job Barney is the cafÃ?© manager for the Borders bookstore at Preston and Royal,” said Harris.

“Some people have a lot of cookbooks with Post-Its all over them or a lot of recipes from newspapers and magazines,” said Barney in a recent article.

According to Harris, people bring Barney boxes of raw material which she then organizes into sections.

“It’s so convenient to have all of our favorite recipes organized in just one cookbook,” said Jane from Dallas, TX. “And the way Deb personalizes each book with family photographs makes it a real treasure.”

Favorite photos, recipes and clippings add up to a book brimming with memories with a title.

Most Tales From The Kitchen books are 8 �½ x 11 inches and contain 80 to 100 recipes, writes Harris.

For those who want something less elaborate Barney makes a 5-by-7-inch book, mostly text with few pictures, at $125 for 100 pages, wrote Harris.

Barney began the books as a project for herself, compiling and retyping her own recipe collection into several large books, according to the article.

“I feel with each one I do, I get a little better,” she said in a recent interview. “My dream is that it’ll turn into a steady enough thing that I’ll be able to cut back on my full-time job.”

Barney has a web site now and she’s starting to take her books to food shows, she says.

“My original concept behind starting Tales From The Kitchen arose from my fondness for general layout work,” Barney explained.

For more information on Barney’s Tales From The Kitchen see recipewonder.com, email ldbarney@aol.com, or call 214-317-1236.

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