If you don’t, perhaps you should start. My life got a lot easier ever since I joined “Eat Your Books.” Would that be good for you? Let’s go over a few simple questions.
1. Do you have more than 50 cookbooks?
2. Do you subscribe to food magazines such as Fine Cooking, Food and Wine, Gourmet?
3. Do you download recipes from some of the very popular food blogs around?(Smitten Kitchen, Simply Recipes, many others available too)
4. Do you often remember a particular recipe, can even visualize the page in your mind, but are absolutely unable to remember where the heck is it?
5. Is this situation familiar to you? Your partner / roommate / parents / siblings know it’s better to leave you alone when you are sitting on a sofa with 12 cookbooks open around, and a very distressed look on your face. You need that recipe, and you will find it, at all costs. 😉
If you answered yes to at least 3 out of the 5 questions, you need to start eating your books. I am sure glad I do! Once you add all the cookbooks and magazines you own to your “bookshelf”, you can search recipes by ingredients, type of cuisine, author, anything you remember about it. Adding cookbooks is very easy using the database available in the website. It is just a matter of clicking on the cookbooks you own, and they end on your virtual bookshelf, ready to be searched. No, I do not own stock in the company, and was not contacted to write a review. I just find it a great tool for cookbook addicts, and maybe some of my readers will benefit from it. 😉
And this, my friends, is my first post composed in the iPad! It took me a ridiculously long time to do it, but I am having fun with My Preciousss…
ONE YEAR AGO: Into the Light
TWO YEARS AGO: Dinner in a hurry
Bewitching Kitchen 
What an excellent idea . . . I loved this post. You have just described me! I;ve also just signed up too. Thank you! 🙂
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I knew I wasn’t alone… 😉
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Wow, this would be a godsend! I’m so glad you posted today. I have a Bookshelf on my blog but didn’t realize this was a searchable database! What a lifesaver!!
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It can come in very handy indeed…
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Oh that’s great, although I do love thumbing through The SIlver Spoon!
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I also love sitting in a comfy chair and thumbing through the pages, and still do it as often as possible. But it’s nice to be able to find all possibilities around for “lamb stew,” or finally find that particular bread I thought about baking and was lost in my own home 😉
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That’s a pretty cool tool. And nicely done on your precioussss. 😉
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Thank you! I thought about uploading a photo, but that will wait for next post.
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That’s such a neat idea Sally! Thanks for letting us know about the handy indexing. I suspect though, it requires me to be organized enough to enter my books and mags in the first place… hmmm, that might be a challenge 😉 Also, I’m afraid I’m with Greg on this one – I like things the old-fashioned way (a bit of a luddite at heart) but understand and appreciate the convenience of technology. Enjoy your ipad Sally!
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It took me a while to enter the books, because I did it during small breaks in the evening and such. But I tried to enter my favorite books right away, and then move to the others at a leisurely pace.
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I have just climbed over the thousand mark in cookbooks. Have been a member for a year and I love it. It makes it so easy to locate old favourite recipes and find new ones. I used to know where every recipe was but not so much in recent years…..Love love love EYB. Now I need a system to organize the books. 😉
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ONE THOUSAND COOKBOOKS! My gosh, you must have a huge bookshelf! I am nowhere near that mark, but no wonder you love EYB. As to organizing 1,000 – that’s a serious task. The problem with doing alphabetical is that books come in different formats and sizes, it doesn’t look good on a shelf organized that way. Maybe you can arrange them by type of cooking, and once you have them separated in sectors, you can enter a little map on an Excell type streadsheet?
Well, the most important is to have fun with it, right?
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Well, when I asked you about EYB this morning I guess you immediately knew that I didn’t read your blog yesterday!
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I knew you would get to the blog at some point… 😉 And you did!
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I love this!! I have at least several hundred! This is a fabulous idea!!
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I am glad I subscribed to it…. have been using it quite often
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Everything but number 1 (though the collection is growing). I’ve got a recipe box full of clippings from magazines and print outs and hand written notes. I’ve been known to ask my mister, “Have you seen the recipe for ______? You know the one that was in Bon Appetit? There’s a picture from a Lagostina ad on the back? I can’t find it in the box.”
No wonder he looks at me like I’m crazy sometimes. I really need to organize the box better. This is a great idea! My only worry is that using something like this would cause me to look at my cookbooks less often. It would be really useful in a pinch, though.
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You know, I still sit with my cookbooks on a regular basis, like a cat in his favorite spot by the fireplace… nothing beats that feeling…
and, to take a ride on your comment, don’t you hate when you are going bananas trying to find THE recipe you want, and your significant other looks at you (trying to help) and says “can’t you pick another recipe?” By now, my beloved husband knows this type of advice is absolutely uncalled for! 😉
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