Cookbooks are often designed to impress, oversized, glossy, full of elaborate photos. Mine are not. They’re small, just 6×9, closer to a notebook than a coffee-table book. For a long time, I wondered if that made them less than. But the truth is, I wouldn’t want them any other way.

There’s a certain strength in stepping outside of expectation. Instead of trying to compete with big, flashy cookbooks, my books move in a different rhythm. They’re simple, approachable and easy to flip through. The kind of book that belongs in the kitchen, not just on display.

When I was little, my family kept recipes in notebooks. They weren’t perfect, pages were stained with flour, corners bent from years of use, but those notebooks carried the meals that mattered. One book in particular has stayed with me. My dad brought it home from the high school where he worked: a collection of family recipes gathered from the seniors that year. It was small, soft, unadorned. No photographs. No gloss. And it’s the book that taught me how to make pancakes.

That little book shaped me more than any beautiful, store-bought cookbook ever could. And in a quiet way, it gave me a blueprint: cookbooks don’t need to be grand to be powerful. They just need to feel like home.

That’s why mine look and feel the way they do. The cream-colored paper has a softness to it, the texture is gentle, not glossy, and it makes the books feel lived-in from the start. As if they’re already ready to be part of your kitchen’s story.

So while they may not fit the mold of what a cookbook “should” look like, I’ve come to see that as their greatest strength. They don’t try to dazzle. They invite. They whisper, instead of shout. And in a world full of noise, sometimes that quiet is the most powerful thing of all.

Every cookbook has its own kind of soul…some whisper, some laugh, some tell stories between the pages. I’m curious, what kind of personality would your favorite cookbook have?