EatYourBooks.com: search your own cookbooks for recipes online

[SLB]

20 hours ago, ElsieD said:

Sure was handier than going through cookbooks, blogs and Mr. Google.

Exactly!  I believe it was @Okanagancook who pointed me to EYB, and I think it's fantastic.  In particular, it's really helped me break out of my ruts.

[Okanagancook]

@SLBglad you find it helpful.  I use it daily.  I am enjoying all the notes members make about recipes and frequently use the sort by ratings feature to find popular recipes.

I believe I took advantage of their initial offer of free lifetime membership…I lucked out.

[SLB]

I'm in the process of adding my index-card box file of clipped and otherwise hand-written recipes.  It's like evening knitting:  a little at a time, watching TeeVee.  I still have a vague but functional memory of what's in that index-card file, so I can (for now) count on mostly remembering to check it when I'm looking for a recipe.

 

But whenever that file is fully integrated, I'm thinking this EYB junket is going to be truly priceless for me.  

Edited July 31, 2023 by SLB (log)

[ElsieD]

Those of you who are members of Eat Your Books and CKBK - did you get an offer to join Scoolinary for a 3 month free trial?  I signed up and they have an amazing number of courses.

[blue_dolphin]

8 minutes ago, ElsieD said:

Those of you who are members of Eat Your Books and CKBK - did you get an offer to join Scoolinary for a 3 month free trial?  I signed up and they have an amazing number of courses.

 

I am a member of EYB and CKBK.  I have not seen anything in my email from either of them about Scoolinary. 

[SLB]

Me neither.  I'll be on the lookout, thanks for the heads up.  

[TdeV]

I'm thinking more about Eat Your Books, so can I ask some questions?

 

Supposing you had some day or three old bread, how would you go about looking for recipes which use stale or dry bread?

 

[FrogPrincesse]

37 minutes ago, TdeV said:

Supposing you had some day or three old bread, how would you go about looking for recipes which use stale or dry bread?

 

 

You can search by ingredient. Here is the result from the search for "stale bread":

https://www.eatyourbooks.com/library/recipes?q="stale bread"

[blue_dolphin]

34 minutes ago, TdeV said:

I'm thinking more about Eat Your Books, so can I ask some questions?

 

Supposing you had some day or three old bread, how would you go about looking for recipes which use stale or dry bread?

 

 

I can't say that's something I'd have thought to search for but when I entered "stale bread" into the search bar, I found  397 recipes on my bookshelf that call for it.  

I also tried searching the whole library for "stale bread" and specified online recipes and it returned this list of 848 recipes. 

[TdeV]

@FrogPrincesse and @blue_dolphin, can you search for "stale bread" and "smoked chicken", i.e. multiple search strings?

 

[FrogPrincesse]

Absolutely. That's the beauty of this, you can search for multiple ingredients (or exclude ingredients), and then you can filter by type of dish or country etc. It's a very powerful search engine!

[FrogPrincesse]

[blue_dolphin]

39 minutes ago, TdeV said:

@FrogPrincesse and @blue_dolphin, can you search for "stale bread" and "smoked chicken", i.e. multiple search strings?

 

Yes, @FrogPrincesse is right, the search capabilities are excellent, particularly when you use the built-in filters.  Scroll back to this post on the previous page of this topic to see how I searched for a Chinese recipe that used fish and cooking greens but was NOT a soup. 
Sometimes, I’ll search the whole library, not just my books, when I’m looking for ideas. Like when I got a recommendation here to combine figs and saffron in a popsicle so I searched for dessert recipes that called for both figs and saffron, just to see what other ingredients might work - dairy, citrus, vanilla?

Quite handy!

[SLB]

@TdeV, it's worth the money, once your recipe collections gets past a certain point. 

[TdeV]

10 minutes ago, SLB said:

@TdeV, it's worth the money, once your recipe collections gets past a certain point. 

 

Last time I looked, Eat Your Books couldn't do what I was looking to do (I checked with Support). So this time, I'm asking the experts! 😃

[blue_dolphin]

1 hour ago, TdeV said:

 

Last time I looked, Eat Your Books couldn't do what I was looking to do (I checked with Support). So this time, I'm asking the experts! 😃

 

I think I remember that you required the ability to search for recipes that used a particular appliance, like a rice cooker or a particular type of cooking like sous vide and that functionality has not been added.  Of course, you can search for "sous vide" and will find recipes that include the term in the recipe name, like Sous vide egg bites  or any recipe in a book called Sous Vide for Everybody but they're not capturing every model of every appliance that might be mentioned in a recipe into a searchable field.  

You could certainly use the bookmarks feature to bookmark recipes, "Instant Pot," "Pressure Cooker," "Rice Cooker," and use those tags to search but that's a lot of work and, at this point, they're not doing it for you. 

[liuzhou]

I gave up on it because the cell phone version, which was what I most needed it for was simply dysfunctional. I just retried after more than a year and it's just the same.

[FrogPrincesse]

3 minutes ago, liuzhou said:

I gave up on it because the cell phone version, which was what I most needed it for was simply dysfunctional. I just retried after more than a year and it's just the same.

Interesting. For the record, it works great on my iPhone!

[blue_dolphin]

5 minutes ago, liuzhou said:

I gave up on it because the cell phone version, which was what I most needed it for was simply dysfunctional. I just retried after more than a year and it's just the same.

It also works well on my phone and I especially rely on that when I’m at the farmers market and spot something that looks good and I want to check recipes so I can pick up any additional ingredients I might need.  
 

Since they don’t have an app and rely on a browser interface for access, I wonder if a different browser would work better for you. 

[liuzhou]

I agree it could be browser related but I've tried it in two common browsers with the same results.

 

It's fine on my PC and lap top using the same browsers. Odd. 

 

It's nothing critical as I rarely cook from recipes anyway. I wanted to use it more as a reference resource.

 

[blue_dolphin]

46 minutes ago, liuzhou said:

I agree it could be browser related but I've tried it in two common browsers with the same results.

 

It's fine on my PC and lap top using the same browsers. Odd. 

 

It's nothing critical as I rarely cook from recipes anyway. I wanted to use it more as a reference resource.

 

Doesn’t sound worth troubleshooting for your use, but if you’re paying for the service, I’d certainly demand a refund!

[SLB]

18 hours ago, TdeV said:

Last time I looked, Eat Your Books couldn't do what I was looking to do (I checked with Support). So this time, I'm asking the experts! 😃

 

Well, I'm glad you did your research before paying for it.  I usually find out after the fact, sadly.

 

[TdeV]

Another query,

 

Supposing you have Jaime Oliver's ONE and have selected a few recipes which really interest you. And the same with Mathew Carver and Patrick McGuigan's THE CHEESE LIFE. And some other cookbooks.

 

In Eat Your Books, can you mark those individual recipes in some fashion? (E.g. in my personal database, I have a tag: _OfInterest). Favourite, perhaps?

 

Later can one query the recipe data selecting for ONLY Favourite recipes to be included?

 

 

 

[blue_dolphin]

11 minutes ago, TdeV said:

Another query,

 

Supposing you have Jaime Oliver's ONE and have selected a few recipes which really interest you. And the same with Mathew Carver and Patrick McGuigan's THE CHEESE LIFE. And some other cookbooks.

 

In Eat Your Books, can you mark those individual recipes in some fashion? (E.g. in my personal database, I have a tag: _OfInterest). Favourite, perhaps?

 

Later can one query the recipe data selecting for ONLY Favourite recipes to be included?

 

 

 

 

Yes, it's done with the "Bookmarks"  feature. You can assign bookmarks to a recipe to to a book.  Here are links to some EYB help articles on bookmarks. 

I believe there's a default recipe bookmark called "I want to cook this,"  if not, you can make one or any others you want.  

Just now, I have a window open with recipes containing mussels that I have marked "I want to cook this" so I'll put in a screen cap from that: 

 

If you assign a recipe an "I want to cook this" bookmark, it gets a red chef hat icon to the left of its name.  If you assign a recipe a "I've cooked this" bookmark, it gets a green chef hat icon. 

I opened the screen above this morning to look for a recipe to make with my remaining mussels and also to mark that top recipe as one I've cooked. 

 

For books, I have a bookmark for ebooks, so I can search them easily when I'm cooking away from home. 

I also have bookmarks for the various cookbook clubs that I participate in. 

 

For recipes, I mostly stick to the "I want to cook this" and "I've cooked this"  bookmarks. 

 

Hope that helps!

 

 

 

[blue_dolphin]

@TdeV, I suspect I already answered your question about using bookmarks, but I wanted to add that it's an EYB feature that I use very frequently, particularly for seasonal produce or items with limited availability.  As long at that ingredient is already in the ingredient filter list, I don't need to make a separate bookmark for say, kumquats or figs or mussels.  I can just pull up all my "I want to make this" recipes and then filter them by "kumquats" etc.  Ingredients that are more specialized, like green tomatoes, might warrant their own bookmark if they happened to be of special interest. 

 

You can also filter your "I want to cook this" recipes by any of the other filters if you are looking for (or wanting to exclude) preserves, or salads, or desserts or sauces, etc.  Quite a handy feature!