Thanks, @Okanagancook, for resurrecting this thread. It's given me some good food for thought. I'd always followed a regular routine of planning around the farmers market or my CSA box, doing most cooking on weekends, focused on dishes that I'd freeze in individual servings for at-work lunches, and occasional mid-week pasta or soup/bread/salad dinners. I kept a mental nutrition checklist of foods that I wanted to include on a regular basis (beans, tofu, cruciferous veg, dark green leafies, fresh fruit, etc) that provided some guidance. I haven't been working for a while so I have more flexibility to try new things but I need a better way to keep track of recipes or ideas that I want to try.
On 12/2/2016 at 3:21 PM, Shalmanese said:Eat Your Books is fantastic for those indecisive moments in the store. Go to the store, figure out the two or three ingredients that are really standing out to you and use your phone to search through your cookbooks at home for interesting ideas involving them.
I have tried this at the farmers market and had trouble reading my tiny phone screen in the brilliant mid-afternoon sunshine but I need to give it another shot. I'm going to try using the bookmark feature in Eat Your Books to keep track of recipes that I want to try. I like that I can enter my own recipes or add recipes from un-indexed sources.
I recently borrowed 2 cookbooks from my library. In order to get the most from my 2 weeks with them, I've been going through them carefully, taking notes, marking recipes or ideas that I'd like to explore. I usually do that to some extent with a new cookbook, but knowing it's going to be handy on my shelf, I don't take such careful notes. I need to set myself a goal to do this with some of the books I own from time to time.
I'm hoping that by marking things in EYB as I think of them, with occasional deep-dives into selected cookbooks, I can build a "To-Try" list in EYB that should help me actually use more new ideas and recipes. Time will tell if I can make it work.
