Kitchen Table

Kitchen Table is a small recipe zine for the four or five dishes a family actually cooks: the soup, the Sunday roast, the cake that appears at every birthday. It is for people who want to write those down for a child leaving home, or a friend who keeps asking, without producing a whole cookbook. The kraft style gives brown paper pages, dark ink and Fraunces, a soft old-style serif, for the recipe names, with a small shadow under each photo. The cover has a photo and the title. Pages two, three, five and seven each pair a photo of the dish with a journaling block that fits a short recipe: ingredients on the first lines, then the method in three or four sentences. Page four is a big photo with a caption and date, good for the cook rather than the food. Page six sets two photos side by side with a caption, for the raw ingredients or the two stages of a dish.

The back panel has a small photo and a sign-off. Recipes need more words than most zines, so write tight: quantities in the first two lines, then the method as instructions, not a story. Around seventy words fit in each block at a readable size. Shoot the dishes from above in daylight; overhead photos crop into the wide slots cleanly. Print on plain 100 to 120 gsm paper; the kraft colour is printed, so ordinary white paper is fine, though real kraft-coloured copy paper at 90 gsm looks even better and saves ink. Fold, cut and it lives in the drawer with the tea towels. Print a fresh one when it gets splashed.

Printing this zine is the easy part: it goes on one side of a single sheet of A4 or US Letter (choose A3 or Tabloid for a zine twice the size), so any printer works and there is no double-sided alignment to get right. In the print dialog pick 100% or Actual size, never Fit to page, or the fold lines drift off the panel edges. Plain 100 to 120 gsm paper folds crisply and stops colour showing through; glossy inkjet photo paper is fine too because nothing prints on the back. Fold in half lengthways, fold in half twice more, unfold, cut the centre slit, then push the ends together and flatten. The template uses 9 photos across its 8 panels; the editor shows which slots are still empty.