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Hi Julie and welcome to EYB.  Yes it would be wonderful if publishers pitched in, since we are doing a great service to the publishing industry.  Many of them (though not all) do supply us with review copies of their books to index.  We are also trying to get them to publicize EYB more through their own sites e.g. by linking to the recipe listings on EYB.

Hi all!

My name's Ducky, and I'm a mid-twenty-something Chicago bibliophile with a penchant for moving around frequently.  I love food, I love cooking and perfecting techniques while developing my skills, and I'm the sort who uses food as a way to show affection.  You can imagine that this love for food - and my seeming incapacity to stay in one location for very long - has made myself and my friends both strong and cranky on moving day!  I cull my belongings before every move, but the two groups that I rarely mess with are my cookbooks and my kitchen wares.  I only have about 50 cookbooks (and I've cooked out of every single one, yaaaaaay!), but my Amazon wishlist has 500+ titles and I have a RSS feed that is cumbersome when I don't read it every day.  

Anyways, this site is awesome and I appreciate ALL OF YOU (especially those who are indexing). Just used the Shopping List feature + actually searching for recipes to menu plan and both are AWESOME and extremely effective.  =D

-Ducky

Hello everyone! My name is Andrea, a communication lecturer, cookbook addict, coffeeholic and soon-to-be food blogger from Pretoria, South Africa. I'm in my early 30s, am married, and have two beautiful labrador daughters who are happy to sample whatever happens to be cooking. Right now my cookbook collection is approaching the 700 mark... I am afraid my obsession with them is something akin to Carrie's obsession with cute heels! But - you read, you learn! So nice to 'meet' so  many people with the same passion, and I am thrilled to have found this platform to help me use the cookbooks I have so much more effectively. I hope to chat to you, and wish you all happy cooking!

Hi, Andrea -- welcome to EYB!  So glad you found us...should be helpful with 700 cookbooks!  Have you noticed that our most recently indexed blog is Cook Sister, written by a native South African now living in London?  Lots of recipes I'd never heard of but you're no doubt familiar with, starting with the name of the blog itself! 

Thanks Deborah! Indeed, I was very pleased to see that! Looking forward to having a thorough browse through the blog. But to you and your team - this is just my favourite find ever, and I've been telling everyone with similar interests about the great job you're doing. Here's to the next 4000 books to be indexed!

Hi I'm Mardel.  I'm still finding my way around and adding things.  I think I have about 1/3 of my books up so far.  I ditched most of my magazines a year ago when we moved, at least the one's with extensive online recipes, and think it is great that at least some of the issues are indexed.  But even without full magazine archives,  this site is already a great help to me as I'm constantly forgetting which book a particular recipe is in.

Hi everybody, I'm from New Zealand. I have acquired a lot of cookbooks over the years, especially as I worked in publishing and a lot of free ones came my way. Signing up for this website has transformed both my cookbook collection and the way I use it. Entering my books into the database forced me to evaluate them all and I concluded that I was not a collector per se but rather a cook with a library of useful books. So a great purge occurred and now I have a working library of about 300 books (still a few to make decisions about). I am also slowly entering about 300 personal recipes that I have compiled in scrapbooks. I use the site all the time to look for recipes and it is wonderful how you think "I would like to make so an so" and you use the search engine and  hey presto! you have 40 possibilities with enough information for you to quickly select the simpler, more elaborate, etc version you want and go right to it. I'm using books again that I had somehow forgotten about and looking with great interest at the new books being reviewed and the most popular books in other people's collections. Thanks a million, eatyourbooks!

Hi, I'm Domino. I've been trying to achieve, privately, what Eat Your Books has done, globally and publicly, and am very thankful for this site. I love to cook and I love to cook from cookbooks. I've told my boyfriend not to ever expect to eat the same dish again because I want to try every single recipe in the cookbooks I own. He's a good sport and he loves my cooking so it works :-)

Hi, I am Pris and live in Ocean Park, Maine.  Retired and living in a retirement coumminty a mile

from the ocean.  I have a large collection of cookbooks and now that I have developed allergies

to so many foods, I am glad I do since I have to make everything from scratch these days.  My

favorites are the Community Cookbooks and I have helped put together a few of them myself.  I

love all kinds of food and am always looking for something new to try. This site will help me to make

use of my cookbooks. 

Hi, I'm Nona and I've been collecting recipes, recipe magazines, and cookbooks since about late 1960's.  I have the complete collection of Gourmet magazines and was sad when they ended the magazine.  I'm originally from Tokyo Japan  but now live in Mountain View CA with my husband. We both retired young. 

Besides English language books, I have about 600 Japanese language cookbooks as well.  I cook from both English language and Japanese language cookbooks.  We normally only go out to dinner when we are traveling or when we are having dinner with friends.  Since I love to cook, we enjoy our meals at home and enjoy taking photos of food and posting to FB.  

Hi. I'm Gill, living in Hamilton New Zealand. Have some 400 cookbooks, not all on EYB, plus magazines.

Loving this website and have recommended several times. 

Getting a lot more use of recipes in different books now. Love to try new recipes and will often select a different book and try a new recipe out when guests are coming. 

I'm asked for various recipes by friends reasonably frequently so this index is a great help.

Hi Gill! 

I just wanted to say that I love this site.  My desire was to have all the recipes indexed before I could no longer cook and this site is certainly helping with the wish list. 

Hi!

I found this site a couple of days ago, and I was so excited to discover what it offered that it took me all of 5 minutes before I paid up for a year. One of my long time "to-do" items was make a copy of the indexes of all of my cookbooks and put them in a binder to make it a little easier to find recipes. I'm so glad I never got around to that task!

I have around 175 cookbooks - and I can't seem to stop. A couple of years ago I thinned them out, promising myself to keep my collection to only 2 shelves...yeah, that worked well. My collection has expanded to 5 shelves, and based on the number of books laying on top of the rows that will be moving upward again. I should have known I wasn't serious when I couldn't get rid of my falling apart, stained Joy of Cooking that I bought in 1979, even though I have the newer version. How could I get rid of it? My favorite bagel recipe is in the old version!

My cookbook collection is all over the place in terms of interests, I seem to always be finding something new to try. Last year I attended a 45 minute class on fermenting and decided to give it a go (it seemed too scary and dangerous before). My first batch of sauerkraut was so yummy I couldn't stop there (ooops...7 cookbooks added to the shelf). My formerly uncluttered counter now hosts an ever changing cast of microorganisms in crocks and jars (currently kombucha, sauerkraut and my latest bubbling jar, a ginger bug).

In addition to cooking fresh I do “make ahead” or “freezer cooking” entrees that keeps us in home-cooked meals when my back misbehaves each winter (8 more added to the shelf). The freezer also houses the bounty from my garden. We have quite a few fruit bearing bushes, trees and vines on our city lot in addition to a veggie garden where I grow the required too many zucchini and tomato plants as well as oca, mashua, chichiquelite, chayote, tepary beans and other interesting heirlooms. All those unusual veggies mean I have to buy more cookbooks, right? Oh, and sweet potatoes. Lots of sweet potatoes...no one warned me that sweet potatoes are like mint plants...ever returning and spreading. Oh well, at least they are good for you and make a pretty ground cover in the summer. Thank goodness for the "Sweet Potato Cookbook". :)

I'm glad to be here amongst other cookbook lovers, and look forward to helping out the community by indexing some books.

– Elizabeth

Welcome, Elizabeth!  Your garden sounds as interesting as your cookbook shelf.  Here's hoping you get through the winter with a minimum of back problems -- have just been through a bad spell myself and am newly sympathetic to all afflicted.

What are your favorite books for lacto-fermenting recipes?

Thanks for the welcome ellabee :)

I think my favorite fermenting book at the moment is "Real Food Fermentation" by Alex Lewin. It is particularly useful for newbies since it has great step by step photos. It only has a couple dozen actual recipes, but it covers all bases - veggies, fruit, meat, dairy, beverages and condiments so it's an excellent all around book for the basics.

Sandor Katz was the speaker at the class I took so his two books, "Wild Fermentation" and "The Art of Fermentation" were the first I bought. The "Art" one is very interesting and is a fantastic information resource for all things ferment, but most of the the recipes are presented in a conversational style so I find it difficult to use as a cookbook. I can see that when the book was indexed only the ones written out as regular style recipes were done, not the ones buried in the paragraphs, and I can understand why - it takes a fair bit of time to suss out what is background and what is recipe in the bulk of the book. I usually check it for additional information before I consider a new ferment but have never made a recipe from it.

Hello, my name is Bea (stardust4300) I just found your website on my Cookbook Junkies site that I am a member of. Thanks so much for asking me over. I love this place!! I am a food blogger newbie you can see me at www.secretsfrommyapron.com. I have hundreds of cookbooks and I just ordered 4 more on Amazon tonight. I wish I had of found you first but that's okay. I am here now. I collect cast iron cookware. I have so many that were passed down through the generations to me and I love them all. I never buy anything that I can't use. It is a rule of mine. I look forward to a long and happy relationship with you!