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I'm not sure about anyone else, but with so many great cookbooks and recipes, sometimes I have trouble choosing one to cook. There are just too many options. Something fun to add to the site would be some sort of random recipe generator where the computer selects a recipe at random from your search list. For example, I might search from my books dinner recipes using chicken. Then I click a button, and the computer selects one recipe at random from my search list. I don't know enough about programming to know if this is practical, but it certainly would be fun.

I don't know about adding it as thing for the site to add to their to do list but I know that on Goodreads many of the groups do something similar with buddies/friends.  They will have buddies choose a book from their TBR for their next read.  I have even seen people do something similar with books on Twitter, someone will post like 10 titles and ask people to tell them which to read first.    

You might me able to try to start something like that if others are interested.  We can see each others books in common I believe.   I don't know exactly how one could organize it, It could be an activity thread, once a week or once a month - a "Pick my Dinner" kind of thing.  I would have to think about how it could work on here within the confines of the forums. 

MarciK - a random recipe generator is on our (very long) development to do list. But in the meantime you could do it for yourself by changing the sort order (on the right in the green search bar). Select the search criteria you want from the filters on the right. Then change the sort order to something different to your usual (the default sort is latest indexed). Mix it up by saying you will take the top recipe on a certain page.

I do wonder though how often a random recipe generator throws out something useful. I tested it myself on my own Bookshelf by saying I'd take the top recipe on page 5 of a Main courses search sorted by Author. I got Sweetbreads with sunchoke puree, raisins, and lemon from the Broad Fork by Hugh Acheson. This isn't a recipe I would cook for myself at home. Though when I went to the top recipe on page 10 I found a recipe I probably would cook for myself - Chicken with capers from The Mediterranean Family Table by Angelo Acquista.

Would you want to be able to keep clicking next on a random generator until you got to a recipe you were interested in?

I would love to see "Random" as an option on the Sort By menu. I have come up with a complicated way to make my recipe searches random-ish: First I add my criteria (ingredients, cuisines, etc.), then I sort them by A-Z (which shuffles everything up a bit so I'm less likely to get a long string of recipes from the same book). Then I google "random number 1 to X" (where X is the total number of recipes in my search). Then I find the recipe that corresponds with that number in my search results. I look at the next, say, five recipes, and pick the one that I want to make out of those. If none of them work, I keep going down the list, or narrow my search and do it all again.

This works pretty well, but it's a lot of steps, and a random sort option would be much faster. I think it would be appreciated by anyone (like me) who wants to try something new but feels overwhelmed by all the possibilities.