I hope that you had a nice festive holiday, enjoying time with your family and friends and sharing recipes for the great food you ate.  BUT it happened to me again. A bad recipe ruined my dinner and ruined my holiday. I should have been wiser but I was fooled again. This is not the first time so I should have been more careful. When I tell you that you should proof your recipes I am not saying just check for spelling errors. I am saying that every item that is in your ingredient list is also in the instructions and most importantly those ingredients that are used in the instructions are in the ingredient list.

I use the ingredient list as a check in my pantry to see if I have the items at home or know they should be added to my grocery list. I am sure that you do the same. In fact if I know that I am not going to go to the store and an item is not on the list and I do not have it my pantry then I just don’t even think about making the dish.

So here I am Saturday making a dish where I did buy half the ingredients and I start putting it together and find an item, condense milk, in the instructions. I am 80% done with the prep and now I have to decide to dump the dish, recreate the dish, check other cook books for similar recipes or hope that without condense milk my dish will turn out.

When I harp that you check your recipes for errors this is exactly what I am trying to help you avoid, passing off recipes to you love ones that will cause problems in the kitchen and may even cause them never to create another recipe from that cookbook and that would the cookbook you worked so hard to create.

While I am still on my rant, could you please cook the recipe that you plan to put into the cookbook and as you have typed it into the cookbook format. It should taste as good as your remember it and it might help catch some of those very errors. If you are putting too many recipes into you cookbook that you do not have the time to cook them all you really need to rethink why you are making an heirloom cookbook. Each recipe is put in your cookbook for a reason and not just to fill up a page. I have lots of cookbooks that fill my shelves but when holiday time comes I want to know that the family recipe book it there with the perfect recipe to fill my table with love.