As many of you have figured out by now, I have a cookbook collection (or as some may call it, obsession).
The wonderful thing about having so many cookbooks is that I always have something beautiful and delicious to browse through when I’m bored at home. The not-so-wonderful thing about having so many cookbooks is that when I’m in a rush and need to cook something in particular, I don’t have time to search out the recipe I vaguely remember seeing in ONE of the 200+ cookbooks I own so I end up Googling for recipes on the internet. Yes, the internet.
Not that there’s anything wrong with looking for recipes on the internet. I mean, many, many, MANY of my favourite recipes have come from fellow bloggers and other online sources, but seriously – with a cookbook collection like I have, you’d think I’d cook from the books more often than, say… once a month? (that’s actually overestimating it).
I couldn’t really see any way of overcoming this issue, short of typing out every recipe in every book that I own (and really, that’s just insane) but then the perfect solution fell into my lap (well, into my inbox anyway).
I was invited to try out Eat Your Books for a few months to see what I thought of it. The folks at Eat Your Books have created a master index of recipes from the most popular cookbooks and food magazines – there’s a whopping total of 1.2 million recipes indexed from 5,454 books and over 2,000 magazines! Every day more books are indexed from their list of over 143,000 books!
Eat Your Books members can add the cookbooks/magazines they own into their ‘virtual bookshelf’ and then use the Eat Your Books search engine to search through your entire bookshelf at once to find the perfect recipe. You can search using ingredients, recipe type, ethnicity, special diet, etc. How convenient is that? Then, once you find the recipe you want, you just head to your own (real life) bookshelf and pull out the book you need (full recipes are NOT listed on Eat Your Books).
There are three levels of membership:
– Free (add a maximum of 5 books to your shelf)
– Monthly ($2.50 USD a month; add unlimited books to your shelf)
– Yearly ($25 USD a year; add unlimited books to your shelf)
I’ve been using Eat Your Books for just under three months now and I LOVE IT. The only problem is that most of my books are packed away into boxes in preparation for my eventual move, so I’ve been slow to add them all onto my virtual bookshelf (I only have about 35 books added) but already, it’s made such a difference to my cookbook collection and I can’t wait to add in the rest and take full advantage of the search feature.
One of my goals this year was to start cooking from my cookbook collection more often and Eat Your Books will definitely push me in the right direction – at the very least, I can’t use the “I can’t remember what book that recipe was in” excuse anymore!
Disclosure: kitchen frolic received a free membership to Eat Your Books for review purposes. This in no way affected our opinions; all opinions expressed are our own. kitchen frolic received no monetary compensation for writing this review. Please read our disclosure policy for further information.
