Shelf Recipes

Shelf Recipes is a recipe accordion that stands on the kitchen shelf, open at the dish you are cooking: eight tall kraft panels, three of them recipe panels with a photo over the method. It is for the handful of family recipes you cook on repeat, for a housewarming, or for a child's first kitchen. The kraft style prints brown panels with dark ink, Fraunces for the recipe names and a soft shadow under the photos. The cover panel holds a photo with the title. Then a recipe panel, a photo of the cook with a caption and date, a second recipe panel, two photos stacked for ingredients or stages, a third recipe panel, another caption panel and the back panel with a small photo and a sign-off. Each recipe panel holds about seventy words under the photo: ingredients on the first lines, the method in short steps.

Photograph dishes from above in daylight; they crop cleanly into the wide slot. Use the caption panels for the hands and the table, which is what makes it a family book rather than a leaflet. The kraft colour is printed, so any paper works, but a cream or real kraft-coloured card at 160 to 200 gsm makes it look and feel right and stand up next to the cookbooks. Because it is single-sided there is no alignment to check, and a splashed copy is one more print away. Two A4 sheets make eight panels, taped at the join; the twelve-panel version adds two more recipes. Nine photos fill it.

Printing this accordion is forgiving because it prints on one side only, so the glossy or satin photo paper home inkjets do best on is exactly right; nothing has to line up on the back. Each A4 or Letter sheet gives four tall panels (A3 gives four bigger ones), and an 8-panel album is 2 strips joined with a strip of tape on the reverse. Use 160 to 200 gsm so it stands on a shelf, and score before folding on anything heavier or the ink cracks at the crease. Fold zig-zag, mountain then valley, using a ruler for the first crease. Print at 100%, not Fit to page, with borderless mode on if the printer offers it. The template uses 9 photos across 8 panels.