About Us

Welcome to Eat Your Books.com, a new website for people who love to use cookbooks. You've come across, and possibly used, many of the recipe sites on the internet that offer you the ability to search thousands of recipes using many different criteria. Some of them are great - but why do you want to use recipes from the internet when you've got thousands of great recipes from talented chefs and authors sitting right on your bookshelf? The problem is you can't search your cookbooks in the same way you find recipes on the internet - it takes a long time to look through your cookbooks to find that chicken stew or chocolate cheesecake you did last year. That is until now..

Why is Eat Your Books unique?

Eat Your Books is the only website that provides you with a sophisticated search engine that searches for your recipes in your own cookbooks in a variety of ways. We have indexed over 270,000 recipes from the most popular cookbooks over the last 30 years. Indexing information includes the name of the recipe, the main ingredients it uses, and very detailed classification of the recipe, such as recipe type and ethnicity. Once you find the recipe you want then you use your own cookbook to get ingredient quantities and method.

We have a database of more than 79,000 cookbooks - although we haven't indexed all of these, we are continually adding to our list of indexed books. If you find we haven't included one of your favorite cookbooks, you can request for it to be indexed. For a more detailed explanation of Eat Your Books go to Overview.

How we got started

Hi, my name is Jane Kelly and I am the founder of Eat Your Books. Like many great ideas, Eat Your Books developed from a need I had personally. As a busy mother, who also loves to cook, I felt I never had enough time to properly plan my cooking - whether for everyday meals or entertaining. Lack of time to prepare resulted in the same dishes on rotation. Yet I have over 700 cookbooks! I found I was using recipe websites to search for new recipes and I got frustrated that I was completely wasting my wonderful cookbook collection.

To resolve my quandary I decided to create a database of the recipes in my cookbooks so I could search easily by ingredient or type of dish. I admit this is slightly obsessive behaviour, but cooking is a major part of my life so I figured it was worth it. When I mentioned it to friends and family, many of them said they wanted to use the database when I was done. I figured although not many people would go so far as indexing their recipes there are many people who would love such a service.

Since then the idea has grown and Eatyourbooks.com was born. My sister Fiona has joined me and together we have planned, developed and launched the website you see today. We hope you'll get as much value and enjoyment from it as we do. I have been discovering wonderful recipes from cookbooks that I'd forgotten about and from my newer cookbooks I'm finding recipes that I may never have tried.

Enjoy!

Our Background

Jane Kelly was a senior manager and CEO in the music and TV industry in the UK. Her career kicked off with an interesting experience working for the independent record label Stiff Records, then starting the first music TV station in Europe and later running one of the Virgin Group companies. In the late 90s she started and ran a website business selling cookbooks.

She loves to cook though is cursed (blessed?) by a family of fussy eaters whereas she will happily eat everything (which is probably also a curse). Jane lives near Boston, Massachusetts with her husband and two teenage children.

Fiona Nugent worked for 18 years in the IT industry - mostly marketing technology that no one knew they needed - word processors in the late 70s, email in the early 80s and personal computer software in the mid 80s. She was with Microsoft for 10 years in the UK, US and NZ.

Since living in her adopted country her love of cooking has become a passion, inspired by the abundance of fresh produce and artisan products that can be found at the local farmers' markets. Fiona lives in Auckland, New Zealand with her husband and two teenage children.

T. Susan Chang is a former book editor turned freelance food writer and cookbook reviewer. Her reviews can be found in The Boston Globe, on NPR, and on AOL starting in spring 2010. She's also a frequent contributor to NPR's Kitchen Window series. More of her stories on food and cooking can be found at her Web site, www.tsusanchang.com.

She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband and two voracious young children, among whose favorite foods are: chard tart, börek, sushi, roast pork buns, ghormeh sabzi, and anything with truffle oil.

How does it work?

First of all we are not a recipe website, we don't publish the recipes - that would be breaking the copyright of these great cookbook authors. The purpose of Eat Your Books is to help you find recipes in your own cookbooks. We have captured information on 260,000 (so far) so you can easily search for recipes in your cookbooks. Here's how it works:

• Simply Register. There is a 30 day Free Trial.
• Select the cookbooks you've got on your bookshelf from our library of 78,000 cookbooks.
• Start searching for recipes - you can search on ingredients, occasion, food type, recipe name, ethnicity, or just name the book or author (and if your friends are members, you can even search for recipes in their cookbooks).
• Once you have chosen your recipes you can add them to the menu planner.
• Eat Your Books will even print a shopping list for the ingredients you'll need for those recipes.
• You can tag recipes as Favorite and recipes you like the look of can be marked as Do Laters. You can even add your own classifications to your recipes.
• Chat to other members who share a love of cooking and cookbooks.

For more detailed information about eatyourbooks.com visit the Quick Tour or Help Section.