5/29/2023 0 Comments Our favorite recipes cookbook![]() ![]() I hoped that it would be a big help in the time of coronavirus, where I was trying to limit my trips to the grocery store and cook what I had on hand. It could come up with a list pulled from those 14,000 recipes. Instead of homing in on those when I got hungry, I'd check in with the website and search based on a craving, something specific I wanted to cook with, or a couple key ingredients. My hope was that Eat Your Books would bust me out of the rut where I only use a few favorite recipes from a few favorite books. To varying-and sometimes limited-degrees, you can also filter by criteria like cooking type (grilling, one-pot meals) or ease of preparation. Impressively, the entire back catalog for Cooks Illustrated magazine is in there, along with 10-plus years of Food & Wine and Bon Appétit, thousands of recipes from The New York Times (by columnist), and websites like Food52. It knows cooking magazines and websites too. There were a couple books that it didn't recognize, but those were on the obscure side. (You can use the website for free, but you can only keep track of five cookbooks unless you pay.) Sitting down one evening in front of my shelves, I plugged in my books and learned I own 68 cookbooks with 14,447 recipes. A premium membership is $3 a month, or $30 per year. When I plugged in "asafetida," it not only found the recipes I was looking for, but also 21 other recipes in two of my other books. From there, narrow your choices, pick your winner, pull the book from the shelf and tuck it into your cookbook holder. The results page gives you recipes from the books you own, usually with the page number. To begin, you tell it all of the cookbooks you own-the company's database has indexed almost 10,000 of them with 1.5 million recipes-then you search for the recipe you want to cook, or ingredients you want to use. If that stack comes up to your waist, Eat Your Books will likely be very helpful. As a quick gauge of utility, imagine stacking all of your cookbooks in a pile on the floor. ![]() The site, Eat Your Books, is niche, but if you cook a lot and own a bunch of cookbooks, it's excellent. In that hour, though, I remembered a website that I'd signed up for a few years ago, then failed to use. By the time I found some, though, I forgot which recipe it was in, and I spent an hour before bed rifling through that same cookbook to find the recipes again-not unpleasant, but not a particularly efficient use of my time. The ingredient, asafetida, is a funky powder that comes from a plant and a fairly common ingredient in Indian cooking. A couple months back, I found some recipes in a favorite cookbook calling for an ingredient I didn't have. ![]()
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