Finding Recipes….So Many Cookbooks – where was that one!?!?

This is a sample screen shot from the help section showing how to add a cookbook to your bookshelf

I’ve been working to organize all of the recipes that I have – finally came up with a solution for magazine, classes, etc. (we’ll save that for the next post…).  The problem I couldn’t really figure out was what to do with all of the cookbooks I have.  Having to look in the index of book after book to try to find specific recipes is very tedious and I often didn’t find what I was looking for.  I needed a way to index across all of my cookbooks!    

While in Portland this year for the IACP conference, I met Jane Kelly at the Expo who was displaying a new web based service to solve the cookbook problem.  Jane is a co-founder of EatYourBooks.com – a site that allows you to create a bookshelf with all of your cookbooks and then be able to search across all of your books by creating an index of all of the recipes.  I’ve been using this service since May – it took a good bit of time to enter all my books … They’ve since added an import feature which will make cookbook entry much easier.     

You can either go through and select all of your books, or create a speadsheet with the ISBN numbers and upload that to create your bookcase.  Once your books are loaded, you can then search for recipes in those books.  I’ve used this when I’m working on menus for classes to get ideas or recipes to work from.  Right now, I have 124 cookbooks loaded in EatYourBooks – and about 70 of them have been indexed.  They are continuing to index more and more books.   

If you have a collection of cookbooks and need a way to organize – give EatYourBooks.com a try.  They have a 30 day free trial.  After the trial, the service is available for $25 per year and for a short time during the development phase, they are offering a lifetime membership for $50.