Forum

Hi!  My name is Paula and I live in San Jose.  I read about EYB in one of my cooking magazines.  Of course I can't remember what magazine it was in, which is why EYB is going to be perfect for me.  It is wonderful to find others who are just as interested in cookbooks as I am. 

Hi!  My name is Cookie and I have just discovered this site today.  I have been looking for a way to organize all my recipes, including those from friends, relatives and magazines.  Eat Your Books looks like a good way to get started.  I would love it if we could access on line recipes and move them into this site.  I also want to include my own recipes.  I have binders and boxes of recipes...not very organized.  Share any ideas with me, please.  

Hi Cookie and welcome to EYB (and of course all our other new members over the last few days who have posted here)

We do intend that you can add personal recipes such as clippings, and family recipes.  These will be private, so only available in your searches.  We also intend to allow links to online recipes, so you will end up with an index of all your recipes, from whatever source.

Hello my name is Helene and I live in New Jersey, USA. I recently went to some cooking classes that came with cookbooks. It made me discover the value of a good cookbook. I now read them not just for the recipes. I have about 20 really nice cookbooks as well as many others. I have been indexing my recipe collection of clippings, mazagines and those booklets you find at the registers at grocery stores for at least 15 years. It is a file that I made using exel and every time I receive a new magazine, or find another clipping I add it to my file. Clippings and recipe cards I keep in binders on numbered pages. They go into the file too. All and all the file has over 31,000 entries. I use it a lot. Having all those recipes indexed made me grab for my indexed recipes rather than looking in my nice new cookbooks. EYB will complement my own registry so my cookbooks are as easily accessible as my own collection. I now make it a habit of trying a new recipe at least three times a week.

Hello, my name is LaPomme, and I've developed an affinity for cookbooks within the past year or so. I belong to a CSA, and this site is key in helping me figure out what to do with four pounds of leeks, a half dozen persimmons, or whatever else ends up in my box week to week.

I prefer referring to cookbooks rather than random searches on the Internet for a few reasons. For one, I carefully select which books I will add to my collection. I become familiar with the author, their techniques and philosophies. I try to purchase books that are reliable and contain recipes that have been tested. Some people may be willing to Google "bolognese" and cook whichever recipe comes up first, but I'm more selective in my sources. This is why EYB is such a great tool: I have the ability to instantly search the sources I trust.

Welcome both Helene and LaPomme.  You both have great explanations of what you are getting from your EYB memberships.  Helene - it would be a huge duplication of the effort you have already put into your Excel database but you could add your favorite recipes on clippings to EYB when we add the feature to allow you to add personal recipes.  That would allow you to search your cookbooks and clippings at once.

LaPomme - I was on a publishing industry panel in NYC yesterday about the future of cookbooks and one of the questions that came up was whether the abundance of free recipes on the internet will cause the demise of the cookbook as we know it.  I argued that there will always be a place for trusted, authoritative voices, whether they are cookbook authors, newspaper journalists or bloggers.  The important thing is that we know their recipes will work.  And of course with EYB you will be able to find those recipes, wherever and in whatever format you have them stored.

Hi, my name is Amanda and I have been a member for quite a few months now, but still have yet to sit down and get all my books listed.  And I've only just discovered the forum!!

I am the mother of 3 teenagers and live on a small acreage in the Adelaide Hills in South Australia where I write a food blog called Lamb's Ears and Honey.  I am a compulsive buyer of cookbooks and this wonderful site will allow me to make full use of the groaning shelves!

Good evening, EYB.

I'm David and am a resident of Wisconsin, but my heart and stomach yearn Southward.  Particulary towards New Orleans and Cajun/Creole cuisine.  Am a bit of a fanatic and have gone to the lengths of seeking out and executing from-scratch andouille sausage for our gumbos and jambalayas.  Have even upgraded to a electric/digital smokehouse to ensure quality outcomes.

After finding out about your service from Chowhound posters, I KNEW it would be of value.  Barely a week goes by without my adding to my collection of cookbooks, and NEVER a month goes by.

My philosophy, heretofore, has been "if I glean just one good recipe from a new cookbook, it's worth it.  With EYB, I'm going to have to revise my expectations.

The service will allow me to quickly/easily scour my library for recipes.  It will NOT replace the joy of leisurely thumbing through, but that will happen also.

More than anything, it will eliminate the piles of cookbooks pulled off the shelf in search of recipes.  For example, the night before I enrolled, I wanted to scratch-make some pasta.  To my wife's consternation (she likes things tidier than I), this resulted in a five-book pileup on the end table at the end of the night.  No more!  Now I can laser in on the one or two books to find that concoction!

I'm thrilled to be a member and thank you for offering this service.

Hi, my name is Diana and I am a new fan of Eat Your Books.  

I am:

a lawyer turned chef (I teach private classes out of my home) in L.A.  

mother of two amazing kids 

a would-be food blogger

a cookbook addict

Hi, my name is Michele and I'm from Toowoomba, Australia.  I found your site from a food blog, and have spent the last couple of days entering my books and finding the ones I've hidden around the house! 

 I've become an empty nester in the last month, and it's taking some getting used too.  So I've decide to throw myself into my cooking and quilting.

Hi, my name is Rob.  I live in Johnson County, Kansas (suburban Kansas City).  Before moving back to Kansas City, where I grew up, I lived all over the country, including New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles and San Francisco.  At various points in my life I also lived in Mexico City, Montreal and Rio de Janeiro, and I've traveled quite a bit in Europe.  All the travels exposed me to a wide variety of cooking and I've ended up being very interested in it and collecting cookbooks from all over the world.  I love Eat Your Books idea of being able to index the recipes in the endless cookbooks so that they're much more easily accessible!  As soon as I get the new USB barcode scanner I ordered from Amazon (a bargain at $31 including shipping) I'll start loading my library!  I also hope it won't be long before members can index some of their own books!

Although I collect all kinds of cookbooks, I particularly focus on Jewish, Mexican, Brazilian, Portuguese, Latin American, Louisiana and American cookbooks. When I retired and moved from San Francisco back to much-less-expensive Kansas City I donated several hundred books to the Johnson County Community College library, because the College has a very large and active culinary arts program. You can browse their extensive collection at http://library.jccc.edu Since then my collection has grown again and is threatening to eat my apartment, so I'm going to sort through the books and donate another bunch! Then they'll be more widely available -- who knows, if you don't own a book or your local library doesn't have it you can borrow it through Inter-Library Loan! The more recipes that are out there, the better!

I've enjoyed e-mailing with Jane with some ideas for the site, too, like linking it to services like WorldCat so cookbooks can easily be found at libraries around the world as well as at book vendors.  Eat Your Books really has huge potential for making cookbooks much more usable and accessible!  

Hi! I'm LucyZoe and my cookbooks reside in my kitchen in Potlatch, Idaho. I work for a publishing company and books make me happy. The kitchen is my happiest place. It's where I go when I have a creative itch that needs to be scratched. 

I read about EYB on a Twitter feed. Several years ago, I began entering my recipes into a database. At the same time, I began indexing selected recipes from several years of cooking magazines, by issue, date, page and all the basic recipe fields, using PrimaSoft PC Software. I customized the software to meet my needs and it's revolutionized the way I search for recipes. Needless to say, when I found EYB I was delighted. Why? Because now I don't have to index all my cookbooks, too. I'm such a happy girl!

I've hesitated adding cookbooks to my collection simply because it's a bit overwhelming searching through all of them. The post-it-notes sticking out of the pages are becoming torn and bent and losing their stickiness. I can now replace the beleagured little notes with EYB bookmarks.

Looking through the EYB library and reading through the recipes will be a great adventure.

Welcome to all the new members who posted recently - Lambsears, Monch, DKennedy, micheleK, chriscooks, robm, lucyzoe and Emily Hope.

Emily Hope - yes we do intend to have links to online recipes when we add the indexing your own recipes feature.  You will be able to add all the EYB categories, ingredients, your own bookmarks and the link so those recipes will then become part of your search.  So whenever you see an online recipe you like the look of, you can add it to your Bookshelf.

We also hope that as the website membership grows that more people will post reviews and ratings for books and recipes.  This will make the site so much more valauble as a resource for cookbook lovers.

I'm Nicole and I live in southern New Jersey with my fiance and six cats :) I've always loved to cook, thanks to my grandmother who filled my childhood with exotic recipes from her huge collection of cookbooks. I've inherited many of hers, plus my fiance is an avid collector of all things Italian so we have a monstrous collection of Italian cookbooks. Plus my own ever-growing collection. I especially love vintage books so I'm eager to see indexing open up to users so I can start helping out (I run a wiki and am an administrator at another wiki, so I kind of have an OCD-thing for organizing information!)

Otherwise I'm a painter, crafter, and freelance writer. I do a lot of writing about food and restauarant reviews, among other things, for the Yahoo! Contributor Network - my profile page is:

http://contributor.yahoo...6/nicole_pellegrini.html

Anyway, really eager to see this site continue to grow and expand as it could really help me utilize all of my cookbooks better.

Welcome Veronica - I'm sure you will see more of your cookbooks indexed over time, we add new ones every day.

The Friends feature had to be removed when we launched the new version of the website in December.  But we are working on a greatly improved social networking side of EYB which we will launch in the next couple of months.  It will allow you to see your friends profiles and cookbooks with lots of other fun features.