Both of my daughters live far away and one of the things we like to do is cook together.
It is hard to cook together except for holidays when we live so far away from each other.
One thing we have done to help this is when we discover a good recipe we take photos and then digitally scrap the recipes and email them to each other! This is nice and helps us feel closer to one another.
Here is an article that will give you some ideas about digital scrapbooking recipes for your grown kids: Keeping Starving Students Fed: 6 Tips for Digitally Scrapping Your Recipes!
Try cooking together over the Phone!
While emailing newly discovered recipes to each other is nice – it doesn’t replace cooking in the same kitchen together! But I have found another fun way to keep in touch and do both cooking and digital scrapbooking with my grown children! The way we have found to do this is to cook the same recipe at the same time over the phone! It is almost as good as being in the same kitchen together!
I have found that cooking together over the phone and Digital scrapbooking the recipes is a great way to stay connected with adult children. This is a way of sharing ideas and recipes along with preserving our family history.
Here is what I do with one of my daughters and maybe it will give you some ideas to use if you want to cook with someone that is far away!
First, we pick out a recipe we want to cook together. We try to get recipes we haven’t cooked before to make the cooking more exciting. Here are a couple of websites that we like that we get some of our ideas from: One website is http://www.eatingwell.com/ and another website we use often is http://www.foodnetwork.com/. Once we get a recipe we like we print it out so we can study it and make a shopping list.
Next, set a date for cooking. We schedule a day and time we can cook together, and of course because we are not in the same town we will have to cook together while using a cell phone. So setting a date let’s us charge our phone battery, get set up with headphones and phone clips so we can walk around hand-free in our kitchen together. You might even see if you can use Skype so you can talk and see each other too! (If anyone out there has tried this and cooking together – I would love to hear how that works out too!)
We set the date a week a head so we are sure to be able to shop for all the ingredients. A week ahead also gives us time to discuss some alterations we might make and get those addition ingredients too!
We then call each other on our cell phones using headphones so our hand will be free, and then we start cooking. As we cook we take photos and write down changes to recipe as we cook together. Both of my daughters are allergic to wheat – so we make a lots of changes to many of the recipes we find and try to cook. So as we cook together we write down all changes of the ingredients, or even amounts of different items, or if we use a different cooking method or pan and even if we adjust the cooking time. It is fun to see the steps in cooking the recipe and also the dish on a plate at the end. We take lots of photos. We even compare photos – from each house – I remember one time my dish was turning out different from my daughters as one ingredient was different because one of us had to substitute an ingredient – we could tell it made a difference from the photos we took and swapped at the end of the cooking adventure!
Next, digitally scrap the cooking and share with family and friends. When we get done cooking together we take all the digital photos and changes we wrote down to the original recipe and then we make a digital scrapbooking page that we can share with our family and friends. For example for this recipe I took a digital scrapbooking kit that had a recipe card in it and scrapped the recipe with the digital photos.
Then I can either turn it into a JEPG (image) or PDF file to email to all my friends and family so they can try the recipe too! If you want know how to save your digital scrapbooking page in JPEG format so others can see it then buy the Lesson 5 training in Photoshop or Lesson 6 training in Elements that covers the topic of saving and printing digital scrapbooking pages.
This is also a nice idea because they have yet another recipe to put in the recipe binders I gave them for Christmas last year. All they have to do is print out the digital scrapbooking recipe file and put it into their binders for use next time they want cook this dish!
Get digital scrapbooking supplies to help make interesting presentations of your recipes:
The digital scrapbooking kit I used for this last recipe was from the Gardening 3 Digital Scrapbooking Kit which is a great for digitally scrapping another one of your favorite hobbies – gardening or even cooking as it has a digital recipe card!
This kit comes with 8.5×11″ digital papers which really works well in home printers as it is formatted to use on regular US Paper.
Keep your family cooking together even when you live in different towns!
It is very fun to find creative ways to stay close even when you live far away! Try cooking together and then turning those adventures into digital scrapbooking pages, or recipe books!
Also, you can use this cooking over the phone idea with parents and friends to that don’t live close. You can cook really with anyone you want to… still have a meaningful activity even when you both are far away!
Enjoy and happy scrapping,
Cheri
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Help your Adult Children learn about Digital Scrapbooking too! Send the Digital Scrapbooking Training CD as a gift for either Photoshop Elements or Photoshop. Get the training at our Scrap Shop today!
Buy Digital Scrapbook Training for Beginners, or Intermediate, and even Advanced Scrapbookers at our Scrap Shop! Also, check out our Digi MakeOver Photo Editing Training too!
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