Welcome to Crafty Cookbook, my name is Jacqueline Schell and this site is where I share my favorite recipes. My goal is to eat at least one great meal every day! To achieve this, I'm striving to develop incredible recipes for a range of effort levels and price points. Sometimes I have the time to whip up a complicated meal, and sometime's I don't, so I want options that fit into all parts of my schedule.
I was originally inspired to start this site to share my homemade sushi recipes, because it felt like there were very few resources online to help people learn how to make sushi at home. Sushi is my favorite food, but like many others, I was way too intimidated to make it myself. When I finally did, I realized it wasn't as hard as I had thought! That's why I put together the Sushi Beginner's Guide, a step-by-step guide that answers all the questions I had when I first tried to make sushi at home.
I used to only share my recipes with family and friends, and I'm so happy that this site has given me the opportunity to share my recipes with people from all over the world. Hearing from you guys, and seeing your creations, makes all the extra effort worthwhile. Thank you so much for your interest in my recipes, I hope to continue learning in the kitchen and sharing the best results with you!
About Me
I live in the greater Los Angeles, CA area with my husband Nathan. I work full time as an engineer in the Aerospace industry, so I run Crafty Cookbook on the side. Cooking/baking is something I fell in love with as an adult, I barely knew the basics when I started living on my own. Slowly, cooking became my biggest hobby. Besides cooking, I love working on other creative projects, playing video games, and keeping active. I love to travel, and I'm lucky to have friends and family scattered all over the US that I try to visit as much as I can. While I keep the main feed of @CraftyCookbook exclusively recipe content, I try to share things like restaurant meals, cooking tips, and recipe development in the Stories section.
The Crafty Cookbook Name
Prior to my love of cooking, crafting was my biggest hobby. Eventually, cooking and baking replaced crafting for me, but I've always felt that they are basically crafts you can eat. Many years ago, I decided to create a personal recipe book, full of my favorite recipes. This took the form of a Google Doc and a binder to store my favorite recipes from all over, as well as my originals. The recipe book felt like the biggest craft project I'd ever started, one that could never really be finished, and it was so exciting to work on and share with friends and family.
The name Crafty Cookbook is a nod to my original recipe binder, and to the idea that cooking is basically just making edible crafts. It's so fun that this project has grown more than I ever could have imagined, and now I get to share my recipes with thousands of people all over the world.
Art on the site
You may have noticed the sushi artwork on the website, all of this artwork was commissioned by Crafty Cookbook through the Fiverr platform. Crafty Cookbook owns the commercial usage rights for all the drawings, please do not use them for any commercial applications without permission. If you're interested in commissioning your own art through Fiverr, you can get 10% off your first order through this referral link!
I decided to get the artwork commissioned because I didn't have clear images of each sushi roll on its own. With ~50 roll recipes already finalized before starting this site, remaking all of them to photograph is a huge undertaking. I am slowly working through re-shooting all these old recipes, and phasing out the artwork. I'll still use the art in some way, but I haven't quite figured out my plan just yet.
Contact
You can reach out to me at [email protected] or via direct message to @CraftyCookbook on Instagram.
