Sparkle Crafts

Sparkle Crafts: Pictorial Family Cookbook

In this week’s Martin & Sylvia: Saturdays! story, “Ramps and Rapunzel”, Mama, Martin, and Sylvia receive a delicious gift from the woods as they are exploring one day – ramps (otherwise known as wild leeks)! Mama and the kids decide to make ramp pesto, after considering all the other pesto possibilities (you can download the basic pesto recipe HERE.

As the noodles and pesto cook, Martin and Sylvia are excited to try their hand at making their own pretend pesto using ok-to-touch plants such as flowers…and many more ramps. Ultimately, with a little nudging from Mama, Martin and Sylvia decide to use the ramps for real pesto instead – grateful for the gift they’ve been given – and a bit more aware of how much they are taking from nature.

It’s clear that pesto and noodles is one of Martin and Sylvia’s favorite meals. Mama even knows the recipe by heart. Today we are going to make our own cookbooks, filled with our favorite recipes to remember for future meals or to share with friends and family! This project is especially great for new readers or pre-readers as you will be drawing each step of your recipes. More confident readers and writers can include written ingredients and directions. Over time, your little one will have a collection of all their favorite recipes in one place!

You Will Need

3×5 inch unlined index cards

Small plastic photo book

Markers, crayons, or pencils

Your favorite recipes

What To Do

Let’s start with the very beginning – your cookbook cover! On a blank 3×5 card, draw a picture of something delicious – your favorite food, perhaps? – along with your name “(blank’s) Cookbook.”

Next, on a new 3×5 card, it’s time to draw your first recipe…starting with the name! Get creative with naming your recipe – it’s yours after all, so you can name it anything you’d like.

Once your recipe has a name, draw a picture of each ingredient in your recipe. If you like, you can label each ingredient as well.

Now it’s time to draw the directions. Each step in your recipe will use a new 3×5 card, so if there were 5 steps in your recipe, you would use 5 blank cards. Use your drawn images and symbols (like arrows) to show what to do each step of the way. Label each picture with a number so that the cook can follow along. Have a grown-up write down your basic directions as well.

As you complete your recipes, just slip the cards into the photo holder. If you don’t have a photo holder, you can punch a hole in the top left corner of each card and tie your recipe cards together with a piece of string. Continue adding recipes whenever you’d like until your cookbook is complete!

Our first recipe was for a favorite meal – noodles with cheese! Take a peek below. What will your first recipe be?

Explore More & Make Connections

Have you tried pesto before? What kind? Try making a new-to-you kind of pesto. How does it taste?

When you eat certain foods or meals, do you have happy memories? Many people do – and these tend to become their favorite recipes, not only for how the food tastes, but also how wonderful it makes them feel. Cookbooks can also capture some of these happy feelings through the recipes and stories behind them. What happy memories will you include in your cookbook?