Accessing Recipes
Setting up a recipe system
- Choose the best format for your recipes—Braille, large print or audio
- Ask family, friends or volunteers to help you locate recipes and adapt them to the format you want
Where to find recipes
Ask the people you know. Good recipes are often passed from one generation to the next in a family. You can also ask friends to recommend their favourite cookbooks.
Search the Internet—the following sites are a good place to start:
Recipe Gold Mine - provides recipes from around the world as well as food related information and links
All Recipes - lets you automatically adjust the ingredients to the number of servings
Meals Matter - provides an abundance of information on meal planning
Epicurious for people who love to eat - lets you enter a list of ingredients to find recipes from a wide range of sources
Adapting a Recipe
Braille
- Recipes can easily be generated with a Braille translator and embosser or with a Brailler or slate.
- Braille your recipes on plastic or thermoform sheets. This saves them from damage and makes them easy to clean.
- Use paper clips to track your progress as you prepare a recipe. Use one clip to move down the list of ingredients. Use the other to move down the list of instructions. This saves scanning the whole recipe to find where you left off.
- Use paper clips to mark favourite recipes in a cookbook.
- Keep recipes in a Rolodex or three-ring binder.
Audio recording
- Leave a small pause between each step of a recipe when you’re recording. This will give you time between steps when you’re cooking and avoid having to move back and forth in the instructions.
- Check the manual to see if your recorder can accommodate a foot-switch. If not, put the recorder in a plastic bag near your workspace to keep it clean.
Large print and low vision adaptions
- Do a Google search for “large print cookbook” on the Internet. You’ll be surprised at the amount of information available.
- Use waterproof markers to copy recipes onto large filing cards.
- Keep paper recipes in photo albums or cover them with clear adhesive sheets to save them from damage and make them easy to clean.
- Use a reading stand to keep the recipe at a height convenient for reading and out of the workspace. This will avoid leaning forward to read, which might block the light or cause you to bump your head on a cupboard.
- Think about good lighting and colour contrast. Light coming in over your shoulder at a 45° angle helps to reduce glare.
- Use yellow filter paper over the recipe if you still have trouble reading it. This turns blue to black for an easier read.
- Attach your recipe to the fridge or a cupboard door. That way, you’ll always know where it is and can look straight at it. It also leaves your hands free to work.
- Keep track of your progress through a recipe by moving a paper clip down the margin as you go.
Electronic Adaptations
There are hundreds of websites offering a wide range of recipes. With a bit of editing and formatting, these can easily be produced in any of the formats described above.