Four Seasons of Gourmet Entertaining, Patricia Gambarelli

Find Your Writing Niche: Recipes and Cookbooks

Most newspapers have a Food section highlighting local produce, festivals and fairs with their food specialties, such as North Carolina’s Oyster Festival, the Blueberry Festival in Burgaw, N.C. and the Blue Crab Festival in Little River, S.C.

If cooking and clipping recipes are your thing, consider contacting a magazine or newspaper with your “special” recipe. “Taste of Home” is one of the many magazines that asks for reader contributions. Keep in mind that the recipes have to be “your own,” not copied from a cookbook or adjusted with a few minor changes.

Another outlet for getting your recipes in print is contributing to fundraiser cookbooks. I have a dozen “best recipes” cookbooks from schools, churches, civic and other organizations and have my recipes in a half dozen of them.

It’s not easy compiling a recipe:

• Ingredients must be accurate
• Amounts have to be included
• Step-by-step is crucial

These Web sites help:

http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-write-a-recipe-58522

http://lifeyourway.net/how-to-write-your-own-recipe/

When it comes to compiling your own cookbook, you have to be quite expert. Check out Patricia Gambarelli. Studying her cookbooks helps see how recipes should be written. She wrote “Pasta for Men Only” and followed it with “The Four Seasons of Gourmet Entertaining.” Her Web site is http://patriciagambarelli.com.

More information is at:

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2007/07/writing-your-ow/

http://www.gourmania.com/articles/writeckbk.htm

And keep in mind:

http://diannej.com/2010/adjusting-a-recipe-doesnt-make-it-yours/