Eat Your Books!

I just recently read about EatYourBooks on Chowhound. To tell you the truth I read a little about it, signed up for a free trial, and then proceeded to forget about it for the length of the trial. That might have been the end of it for me, if the people at EYB hadn't emailed me and offered me another 30 day free trial. They had just relaunched a new version of their website and they wanted me to try it.

Now, what is EYB you ask? If you are anything like me you probably have tons of great cookbooks. You might have 1-2 favorite recipes in each that you know are there and that you use. However, every time you need a new recipe for something you go online instead of looking through tons of cookbooks. Online recipe gathering is much easier and less time consuming, however the recipe authors are not always as trustworthy as the ones sitting on your shelf already.

EYB is an online database of cookbooks. You input the titles (or ISBNs) of your cookbooks. Most  relatively popular/new cookbooks are in the database and indexed. They are indexing new ones each month. I only had a small handful of my 60 books not already indexed. Most of them were local or older cookbooks.

Once your online book shelf is filled, you can use the search engine to search for cherry pie. I had 37 recipes for cherry pie on my bookshelf. The recipes themselves are not in the site. Just the name of the recipes and the ingredients (minus common pantry items) are listed. I found the recipe that looked good, and then grabbed the cookbook.

Say I wanted a cherry pie without cinnamon in it. You search cherry pie. Then on the sidebar, you can find cinnamon in the ingredients, choose it, and then choose to remove it from the search.

Or.... say you have broccoli that you need to use in your fridge. You can find a great looking recipe for it in your cookbooks.

Now that I have all my cookbooks entered and I have been using it, I am unbelievably excited about this. I think it will totally change the way I cook. The best part is, they are offering a lifetime membership for $50 for a limited time while their website is still in Beta. I have already signed up, it only took me a few days of using it to decide.

They also have a notes section on each cookbook and on each recipe. This allows you to write down any changes you made to the recipe and what you thought of it. Eventually all these reviews will be very helpful to everyone.

They also have a Friends option which allows you to interact  with people you may know on the site. You can even look at/search their cookbooks as well. This Friends option is down since the update, but should be back better than ever soon. (My username is porterbl1)

(I should mention that there is one drawback. I have found that it encourages you to buy more cookbooks, because it makes them so much easier to use!)