I found this really neat online forum for cooks who love cookbooks: www.eatyourbooks.com
You can set up a free account to try the site, but that only gives you the opportunity to add 5 cookbooks to your library. If you pay $30 USD per year or $3 USD per month you can have unlimited access.
In short, the website provides you access to a plethora of cookbooks and an index of their recipes. Due to copyright laws you can’t access the full recipes unless they’re available online somewhere, but what it does is give you a way to search ingredients and recipes in the many many cookbooks you own. People are able to rate cookbooks, rate recipes and write notes and reviews about specific recipes. If you’re unsure about a certain recipe you can see if others have tried it and read what they thought.
There is a downside, in that some of the cookbooks are not indexed. That is, there is little value in having the cookbook listed in your library if the recipes inside it are not indexed and searchable. You can request that a cookbook be indexed by Eat Your Books, or you can index it yourself and submit it. This means you’d have to go through the Table of Contents and type everything out… ugh.
I haven’t quite figured out the rest of the site, but it provides access to online recipes, magazines, and popular foodie blogs.
There is a forum and blog section on the website as well, where questions are posted and topics are discussed. There are also opportunities for cookbook giveaways, but at the time of writing this post, 7 cookbook giveaways were posted, but only 1 was available for Canadians. Boo.
I’ve already used the site to figure out which of my cookbooks had recipes for pork tenderloin with the ingredients that I had on hand. It was a relatively quick and easy approach to finding a recipe. If you sign up, I’m registered as eatwithmecanada, so check out my library!
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