Eat Your Books

You know how you see something that you've been dreaming of doing forever, but somebody else had the vision or the guts or the time or the whatever to actually go ahead and do it? Grrrr. Well, that's the way I feel about a website called Eat Your Books.

The website was born of a home cook's need to actually know what was in the 700+ cookbooks she owned. She found that, in spite of her giant library, when she was looking to cook something specific--a cuisine, a certain dish, a recipe featuring a particular ingredient--she turned to Google. Silly when you think of the fact that she (technically) had over 175,000 recipes sitting on her bookshelves. So she did something about it and started indexing her cookbooks and putting the information into a searchable database. The idea grew from there and now on Eat Your Books, there are almost 540,000 recipes that have been indexed from cookbooks (including books that are just off the press), magazines, and food blogs.

Since I have for years been planning on indexing all my cookbooks into a database, I am both extraordinarily jealous and in deep admiration of Jane Kelly, the brains behind the idea. There is a free membership that allows you to load your bookshelf with 5 books or you can pay $2.50 a month or $25 a year to have unlimited books on your bookshelf. This gives you access to the searchable database. There are also links for buying books in case you stumble across one that you wish you owned.