I am so sad to hear that Rose Gray has died of cancer at the age of 71.  In my expense-account days in the TV industry in London, I would eat often at the River Cafe.  I can remember the first time I went there - it was so novel to have an Italian restaurant that was modern, classy and the food wasn't the stodgy standard-fare of London's traditional Italian restaurants.  Rose and her partner Ruth Rogers inspired and nurtured so many great chefs through the River Cafe kitchen.

I have bought and loved the cookbooks that Rose and Ruth produced.  Their recipes were so simple, fresh and always delicious. Rose will be sorely missed in London and by lovers of simple Italian food everywhere.

Those Joy of Cooking books really are monsters to index - they have 12 times more recipes than the average cookbook.  We have just added our second one, the 2006 75th Anniversary edition.  At almost 3,000 recipes it took months to index - we kept having to give the indexer (Martha) breaks on other gentler books so she didn't crash and burn.  We have one more edition, the 1997 6th edition to finish - then that will be more than 9,000 recipes on EYB just from Joy of Cooking. 

Welcome to all the new members who have joined up following the article about EYB in the Cooking Club of America Enewsletter.  We hope you enjoy your experience at EYB - please be aware that we have just recently launched and we are constantly improving the website.  If there are any new features you would like to see, please email us at info@eatyourbooks.com or post in Give us your feedback on the Forum.

We added our 900th indexed cookbook - Jacques Pépin's Complete Techniques which brings the total number of indexed recipes on EYB to almost 215,000. We have a lot of new features we are planning to add to EYB in coming months - one of our priorities is a form to allow members to index their own cookbooks if they wish.

Ruth Reichl didn't like Adam Gopnik's article in The New Yorker and on her blog she explains how her approach to cooking differs. I'm definitely in Ruth's camp - cooking because you love to do it and because you love feeding other people good things to eat. Adam's constant striving for perfection, and disappointment that each recipe never quite takes him there, doesn't connect with me at all.

I will be doing a live interview Sunday morning on 4FM Radio in Ireland, around 9:30am on Sunday Breakfast with Michael Comyn.  That is 4:30am here on the USA east coast - I hope I can talk sensibly at that hour!

We have a new server!! Apologies to anyone who was inconvenienced by the changeover whilst the site was down, but hopefully you'll think it was worth it. I won't go into the technical detail, but we have also made some significant changes to our code that will allow us to improve the usability of the site and add the features that many of you have asked for, as well as the many other enhancements we have planned for the site over the next few months.

Improvements to Eat Your Books includes:

• Faster page refresh times
• Several bug fixes
• New Blog including RSS feed
• Gravatar integration for the Forum and Blog
• A new Forum - it's looking rather empty at the moment - be the first to post on topics that interest you.  Our apologies that we have had to start afresh and are unable to use the posts from the old forum.  Please be assured that we have taken note of all the suggestions that have been made to date.

See my blog from January 18 for more information on what some of our planned improvements are. 

We thank you for your patience - we know that many of you are loving using Eat Your Books, we plan on making that experience even better.

An interesting article by Sarah Dickerman on Slate.com as to whether the iPhone could take over from the cookbook in the kitchen. She concludes not, though does see the advantage of a digital shopping list on your phone. We are intending to add an iPhone app, as well as apps for other smartphones, in the not too distant future. You will then be able to look up a recipe in your cookbooks when standing in the grocery store, and add the ingredients to your shopping list. Any other features you would like to see, please let us know at info@eatyourbooks.com.