How to Start Your Own Cookbook Club

If you’ve ever wanted to start a cookbook club and didn’t know where to start; this is the post for you! I walk you through all the steps!

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know that I host a cookbook club at my house with my girlfriends every other month.

It’s SO much fun and it really gets people out of their comfort zones because some people don’t cook that often or some don’t really branch out to different kinds of food.

This is such a fun way to get everyone together. There is absolutely no judgement on the food or presentation of it.

It’s literally no pressure; at the end of the day, it’s just food and whether or not you have fun!

Many of you have messaged me to ask how to start one of your own so today’s post is all about how to start a cookbook club of your own!

If you’re interested in starting your own, it’s super simple and a lot of fun.

I mean, if you love food to the degree that I love food, you need to sign yourself up for this club or start one!!

What are the steps to start a cookbook club?

The idea is that you all choose a cookbook to cook out of. Everyone makes a dish from it and brings it to the host’s house.

You can then talk about the cookbook, the dish you made, etc. It’s a great way to get together with friends monthly or bi-monthly and you get to feed each other. What is better than that?!

How it works is you decide on a group of your closest girlfriends that you would enjoy dining with and also ones that you know love food and aren’t afraid to try new things. You send out an email to see who all is interested.

Those who are interested, you create a separate email list and send out a Doodle. A Doodle is basically a planning platform that helps you quickly figure out the best day and time for the entire group.

Instead of having numerous emails back and forth trying to figure it out, you send out the Doodle poll and everyone selects all the dates and times that work for them.

Once everyone has taken the poll (you’ll likely have to send one reminder and I usually give a deadline like, “take this poll by ______”) you can easily tell which date/time is the majority. If there’s a tie, then the host picks the date that works best for them.

At that point, you email the ones that can attend and let the ones that can’t know the situation and you’ll include them for the next meetup poll.

You email the ones that can attend and you start a discussion on which cookbook you all are cooking out of!

Then you just keep doing it over and over again :) usually the person hosting switches out with each meetup but you can do it however you want.

We usually come to mine because I love hosting and it’s a bigger space.

If someone lives in the middle of everyone then their house just might be the most convenient, etc.

Do you have to buy a new cookbook every time?

No! You don’t always have to buy the cookbook if you’re on a budget.

You can do cookbooks that people in your group already own and they can take a photo of the table of contents and you can pick recipes that way and then they can take a photo of the full recipe for you once you’ve picked.

You can also go to your local library to see if they have a copy, there are some online places that have them for free, you could maybe even cook from someone’s blog (hint hint, lol), or you can just buy it to support the author!

How is your cookbook club run?

For my cookbook club, we do it every other month because every month is a lot to commit to and it just works for us.

Typically, we tell everyone to leave their kids at home because it’s mama’s time and everyone needs some adult time. It’s only about 3 hours so it’s not like they’re gone the whole day.

However, if there are situations where someone has to bring their kid(s), that’s totally okay too but I have found that most like to leave their kid(s) at home with their spouse, haha

What cookbooks have you done?

We’ve done six cookbooks! I have only blogged about four; I’m a little behind.

• Cravings by Chrissy Teigen
• Cast Iron Gourmet by Megan Keno
• Against All Grain by Danielle Walker
• The Pretty Dish by Jessica Merchant
• Magnolia Table by Joanna Gaines
• What’s Gaby Cooking by Gaby Dalkin

So, for October, we are doing Chrissy Teigen’s second cookbook that releases at the end of September.

It’s really timely because 1. it’s our one year anniversary of cookbook club and 2. her first cookbook was the cookbook we started cookbook club with!

Anyway! Let me know if you guys start your own cookbook club or if you have one already!