Forum

Hi, I'm Leigh, an American living in France for almost 30 years.  I was delighted to find this service.  I love to cook and am constantly trying new dishes.  With the ease of the Internet, my cookbook collection was gathering dust.  I have around 300, many of them older ones that aren't in the EYB Library yet.  I am excited to have the same easy access to my newer printed recipes.  This is definitely a site I'll share with friends.

Hello,

My name is Sarah and I am so excited about this website.  It is going to be great to cook more from my cookbooks instead of printing out recipes. I always lose those sheets of paper so quickly.

This Fall I am headed to Washington, DC to start culinary school and get a baking and pastry degree.  I cannot wait!

I think this site will inspire some great food this summer.

My name is Vickie and I am a cookbook addict. I have a hard time resisting new cookbooks that come out that I feel I just have to add to my library. When I only had a few, I found myself reading them cover to cover. But since I don't do that any more, I discovered I was rarely using them. EYB has already helped me immensely and finding recipes I want to make and I am definitely using my books more. Also enjoying sharing with other site users.

EYB is the bomb!

Hi, my name is Ania, and I'm running our of space on my bookshelves. Reading about food must just be the second best thing after cooking / eating it - isn't it?  I love this site, having uploaded only a small proportion of what's gathering dust on my shelves, I have rediscovered some old favourites and found some new gems as well. Well done Jane and Fiona! 

Ania

Hello

My name's Kat, I live in Brisbane, Australia. I really like this site but I'm yet to decide if I'll take up a proper membership. I might have to buy a few more cook books in order to justify it!

I'm interested in vegetarian cooking, seafood and using smoking for both (I have a Cobb which I want to get better at using).

I'm way too reliant on the Cook's Companion by Stephanie Alexander.

Finally, I'm @k_o_o on Twitter if you're into that sort of thing.

I'm Joy and I have a joy of cooking; also eating!  I read cookbooks like others read romance novels.  I used to keep them all, but my urge to purge caught up with me after about 30 years and I gave most of them away.  The good news is that now I only keep the ones I think I'll actually use, not just because they're books.

Like a lot of folks here, I was ignoring my cookbook collection and just searching online for recipes, even when I knew I had at least one recipe for whatever.  I started thinking of doing very much what this site does, but it seemed like an awful lot of work just for my own use.

I especially like vintage (pre-1950s, to me) cookbooks.  Unfortunately, EYB doesn't accomodate those at this time.  But thanks to EYB, I don't have to look through my whole collection any more--just the old ones.  I get a lot of my vintage books from a local bookstore that sets out boxes of free books daily--ones they have too many of, are of limited interest, or are just in such bad shape no one will pay for them.  I may not be willing to pay for a filthy cookbook, but I'll sure pick it up and give it a read, especially the pages that are the dirtiest, since those are the most-used recipes.

I'd like to say I garden, but if anyone saw my yard, they'd probably disagree.  Most things I plant don't seem to live long.  Instead, I say I yarden--if something wants to grow in my space, more power to it!  I'll mow around it and see how it goes.  Currently, I have a snow pea plant growing up a rose bush; I think the squirrels planted it!  But most herbs like my yard okay, at least the weedy ones.  Not basil or cilantro, though, probably because they know I like them.

My daughter and granddaughter both have celiac disease.  I've been experimenting with baking gluten-free bread for them since grandma always has time for such things.  It's a real challenge to remember which book had which recipe; that's the main reason I joined EYB.

Hi, I'm Sarah from Cookeville, Tn. I have had a cookbook addiction all my life. I read them like novels. Sometimes I read about cooking more than I cook. ;) My husband and I moved to Tn from Tx where we added a room on to our home with a floor to ceiling wall to wall bookcase that was filled with mostly cookbooks. Our new home has only one small bookcase that's about 5x3'. So, I have had to be choosy about which books I put on that precious book real estate. It's hard to choose from my collection. Luckily I have had the habit over the years of copying my favorites into some notebooks which I helps me allot. This is a great concept and I look forward to exploring it. 

Happy cooking!

Hi: My name is Wendy.  ChefWendyB.  I am a classically trained chef.  I no longer work in restaurants.  I am a Research Chef and develop product for retail sales.  In Costco, Walmart, Loblaws (I'm Canadian) etc.  Also do some development for Restaurants that outsource their menu's.  A sad fact nowadays.  They aren't so much cooking in the back as reheating these days.  Certainly in the chains.  But that doesn't have to be a bad thing!  I work very hard to inject the passion of the chef into these products.  I own nearly 1000 cookbooks.  Some are very obscure and would not end up on Eat Your Books but that's O.K.  This web site is a brilliant idea.  I'm giving it the 30 day try.  If it pans out the way I suspect I will be a "lifer".

I look forward to getting to know some of the members and learning about cook books I don't yet know.  I can never have enough!

Hi all,

I'm Kerrie, in Sydney Australia. 400+ cookbooks. I have worked on an australian food tv series as researcher, I cook food, read about food, write about food, grow food, and generally am consumed by food. And I can't resist a cookbook. This site will be fantastic for me, and I'll look forward to every new development.   I'm away from home as I'm creating my bookshelf, and am using Amazon to help jog my memory. Trouble is, I've just put 20 new books on my Wish List. Yikes. Really looking forward to participating in this great venture.

Hi I'm Karin in Sydney, Australia.  Been passionate about cooking and cookbook collecting for many years. Really looking forward to getting reacquainted with some of the books I haven't been to for a while - like meeting up with long lost friends.

Hello. I'm Katti, and I'm a cookery book addict from Norway.

I feel like I'm introducing myself to a local chapter of AA or something now ;)

At last count I had 200+, of which I've been able to add 126 to my bookshelf here. I seldom seem to get around to cooking much from them as much as I'd imagined I would though. I tend to stick to my tried and tested favourites as I seldom have time to pore over all those volumes to find something to cook. I'm hoping that will change now that I can easily search quite a few of them.

My name is Angela, and I stumbled upon this site.   I love cookbooks, and try to use them.  A while back, I tried creating a simple Excel spreadsheet of recipes I used, but never came it up.  I always wanted to way to search my cookbooks, and here it is!

A few questions:

what is the notification for?

I added my cookbooks, but didn't put in any classifications, can I go back to this and edit my books?  (I didn't see it, but maybe I am missing it)

Finally,  if you need an indexer, I would be interested.  (my background is in libraries)

thanks

Angela

Welcome Angela 

Notifications are for when you send out friend requests or receive friend requests.  We are planning to completely redo the whole social networking aspect of the site (after we get this big site redesign finished).  We will be asking members for features they would like to use.

You can go back and add classifications any time to your books and recipes.  Set up the categories you want in Classifications.  Then open My Bookshelf (under My..., not Search) and go through your books ticking the ones you want to add to each category.  Then click Categorize or Locations in the green bar at the top.  Make sure you add your selections before moving on to the next page or you will lose them.  The new search will be easier to use - all categories will be listed as Bookmarks and you can add them to each book individually.

If you are interested in indexing, email us at [email protected].

Hi,

I'm Clare, from South Australia. I've been *dying* to find a resource like EYB for ages - enough cookbooks for my braincell to go in to overload and turn to google to find dinner ideas and that was annoying me... But now looking at how many some people have around here, am feeling ok with my obsession/collection ;)

My absolute favourites are Murdoch's "The Food Of..." series - I've now got them all and haven't experienced a dud recipe yet. Plus the photos are glorious and the info pages pretty good too. Can't wait for EYB to index these! Other favourites include Ant Egg Soup, Food Safari, My China, Turquoise and and old (75?) Larousse I rescued from a skip once. Has an edition of this been indexed? I'd hate to be the one who got _that_ job!

Like others here I've also got an interest in gardening, not that my garden demonstrates this very well, particularly Australian native food plants. But in these times of drought and/or flooding rains, I'm finding it much more enjoyable to stay in the kitchen :)

C

Hi Clare and welcome

We are loving having all you Australians joining up following the article in The Australian Weekend magazine.  We hadn't actually intended to launch in Australia and New Zealand until later in the year, so we are now urgently recruiting indexers and getting more Australian books indexed.  So you will see a lot more of your books indexed in the next few months.

Larousse (and Escoffier) are on our indexing lists - monsters both and not the easiest of books to index.  I own the 1988 Larousse so that is probably the one that we will start with, as it's the one most members own, then we will have to do the expanded and updated 2001 edition.  With 3,500 recipes that is going to take a while. 

Hi Claire, fellow Mass resident (hot and steamy enough for you?)

Yes, one of the many good things about EYB is that it justifies buying more cookbooks!

We will definitely allow members to index cookbooks in the future.  We have a major recoding of the entire website going on at the moment.  As soon as that has finished in the next few weeks we will be moving onto an indexing interface on the website which will allow firstly our indexers, and then our members, to index directly on the server.  At present we email databases around which is not a good solution.  Once members start to get involved in the indexing the number of recipes will increase dramatically - hopefully most people will see the benefit of crowd-sourcing this data.  We all benefit.  Of course, EYB will continue to index new books as well as the books most members own.  We see it being the less "popular" and older books that members will want to index.

Hi! i'm judiu, from South Florida. I had about 300 cookbooks, and lost them in a house fire years ago. I now have about 100 new and duplicate copies. I would love to see recipes form books other than normal cookbooks collected here; many of the mystery novels now available have recipes in them . Since I get those books from the public library, I don't always have the recipies to hand. I used to catalog my own books by hand in a huge note book, listed by the recipe, the book, the stuff I don't usually have on hand (shopping list), and other factors (who does not like curry, or barley, veal, or etc.)

Welcome judiu

We can add any books with recipes, including memoirs and novels, so if they aren't already in the Library, import the ISBN using the Import Books feature and we will add it when we set up new affiliations with more booksellers.  But don't forget, we don't list the entire recipe, just the ingredients and categories so if you don't own the book, you wouldn't be able to cook it from our listing.

How terrible to lose all your cookbooks!  Those and photos are the possessions I would be most upset to lose in a disaster.

All the cataloging of recipes that you used to do in your book, you can now do on EYB.  We don't yet have private comments, though we will be adding it, so things like family likes and dislikes can be noted.