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
200,000 recipes from the most popular cookbooks over the last 15
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 16,000 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 215,000 (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 16,000 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.