I come from a family of cooks. My grandmother, mom, and aunts are all incredible in the kitchen. To honor them and the role food has always played in bringing our big Dominican family together, I had the idea of creating a physical cookbook of their recipes to print out and gift to all of my family members.

Little did I know the huge undertaking that gathering recipes from different sources would be. Taking notes while my grandma made her famous “Habichuelas Rojas”, transcribing my aunt’s voicenote for “Risotto de Camarones”, and trying to decipher my mom’s handwritten recipe for “Sopa de Lentejas”.

Overwhelmed, I paused the project… but the problem stuck with me. I tried different tools like a shared Google drive, text threads, apps like Recipe Keeper and Cook Mate to try to get everyone organized and collaborate but none of the solutions had the flexibility that we needed to import recipes from various sources and then export to a physical cookbook.

This set of challenges inspired Famealy.

I spoke with a group of individuals, including younger members of a Dominican family spread across different countries who want to stay connected through shared recipes, an engaged Filipino-American woman who hopes to carry her family’s recipes into her marriage, and an Egyptian man in the U.S. who keeps his culture alive by cooking for friends, a Swedish-Dominican couple looking to blend their food traditions, and an Indian woman who doesn’t cook often but wants to stay connected to her culture and family through recipes.

Most of them expressed:

• Consensus that family recipes are deeply tied to memories, holidays, and generational traditions.

• Reliance on handwritten notes or memory, creating a real risk of losing family recipes.

• Desire for recipe personalization and flexibility to account for dietary restrictions, serving amounts, and measurement system preferences.

• Strong interest in converting digital recipes into printed formats for unique gifts and for their own enjoyment.