Eat Your Books

 As you may know, I have a few cookbooks. I have more than a few. When I get a new book, I mark down (using post it notes) which recipes look interesting. And then I put the book on the shelf and hope I remember what recipes are in there. 

I plan my menus weekly, and go through some of the books searching for the perfect recipe for the week (who is eating dinner at the house and how much time I have to prepare the meal). 

One of my community members, Robin, suggested Eat Your Books.

Here is how EYB describes itself:

Eat Your Books is a website for people who love cookbooks and love to use great recipes. If you have a cookbook collection, you probably get a lot of pleasure from browsing your books - but there are times when you haven't got time to look through them all to find a recipe. Or maybe you feel you're not using them as effectively as you'd like, sticking to familiar recipes or not branching beyond the current favorites.

Eat Your Books can help you find recipes in seconds - we're the only website to have indexed the most popular cookbooks, so you can include them in your online searches.You might also like to use recipes from other sources and with Eat Your Books you can do a single search across ALL your recipes, no matter where they are.  

With Eat Your Books you can create your own personal Bookshelf and you can find recipes across:

• Your cookbooks - tell us which cookbooks you own. If we haven't indexed a favorite book, use the EYB indexing tools and do it yourself.  

• Your food magazines - add that stack of magazines, all the most popular magazines have been indexed.  

• Great food blogs and websites - add Food52, David Lebovitz, Smitten Kitchen, 101 Cookbooks and many more.  

• Your own personal recipe clippings - bring some order to your clippings files by using the EYB indexing tools.  

• Your favorite online recipes - using the EYB Bookmarklet you can add any online recipe to your collection.

Eat Your Books is NOT a recipe site, so you won't find the recipes here, but you will be able to find them and if there is an online version of the recipe there will be a link to it.  

It costs $30 a year to sign up. Once you are a member you select the cookbooks that you own to your bookshelf. I would say 99% of my cookbooks that I own have been indexed, so I don’t need to add anything else. I have a few books that are not indexed (mostly community groups that published cookbooks for fundraising), and I haven’t had the time to volunteer to index them.

Once your books are entered, you can search your recipes (and you can filter for ingredients, and course (Asparagus and side dish); and the titles appear (with the cookbook and page number).

It is life changing, especially if you belong to a CSA and get weekly boxes. You can search for that ingredient and find a recipe in a book that you already own.

I have already searched their list of cookbooks that will be published in 2023. That is very nice.

Let me know what you think.