Recipe Club: The Most Delicious Library Group
Once a month, twice a month, or weekly, you can have a group that loves to talk about food! What could be better? Out of all my regularly scheduled programs, this one is my favorite. We meet right before lunch, but that’s okay. Not only do we talk about food, we eat food, too!
Start your Recipe Club with a theme; gather recipes that pertain to that theme and make copies to be handed out at your first meeting. For example, start with lemons. Search for recipes that contain lemon, and it doesn’t just have to be desserts. Just googling Lemon Recipes, I found several places to go for reliable recipes. Braised Chicken with Artichokes, Olives, and Lemon is from Martha Stewart. Basil Shrimp is from allrecipes. And of course, my favorite, Lemon Bars from Ree Drummond at The Food Network. As a courtesy, I also like to print out information on the ingredient featured, like how it is grown, any unusual features about it, where you can get it if it is a more difficult to find ingredient, and the nutritional value. But the best way to showcase a food is to bring samples of it for members to taste.
Graduate to a Recipe Cookbook Club, where you can pick out a popular cookbook, bring copies in from other libraries for your members to check out, and create some of the recipes featured. Be sure pick a cookbook that you can get copies for. Many times, good cookbooks aren’t always the popular cookbooks and other libraries don’t stock them as much as they do the ones in high demand. Keep a list of cookbooks that you can get readily so you don’t have to hunt for them every month.
When you have a constant attendance of regulars, think about starting your own recipe cookbook. A community recipe cookbook is always sought after by locals and tourists. You can make your cookbook into a fundraiser for your library’s friends group or for the club itself. One thing I’ve always wanted to do was to invest in bakeware that patrons can check out. For our cookbook, we went with the Morris Press Cookbook company. There are other places out therethat you can investigate too, but this one had the best prices for the amount of books we wanted.
And as always, Happy Eating!
Tags: book clubs, cooking at the library, library programming, unique library programs
