The Suburban Herbivore

The scene: Sunday morning, around 8am. It was your morning to get up with your son, so you’ve been awake since about 6. He is, however, taking his customary early morning nap. Your spouse is asleep, too.

There is exactly one hour during the entire week that you have completely to yourself, and this is it. So you’re using it to plan out the meals for the coming week. (You do that, right?)

As you poke around in the refrigerator to see what produce needs to be used up, you notice several poblano chiles. Hmm, you say, I wonder why I bought those? Suddenly, you recall a delicious chili verde that you used to make a few years ago. Oh yes, you say, that’s what I should do. Now which cookbook was that in, again?

Some of my cookbooks.

You pull down the 5 or 6 old stand-bys and look at the indices. No luck. Well, you muse, I’m pretty sure it was called chili verde. You take down a few more, and don’t find it in those, either. Cookbooks are starting to pile up on the counter and floor. You suppose you could look online, but you really just want to make that particular recipe, and the chances of finding it, or even recognizing it out of context if you do find it online are slim.

Then you hear stirring from the next room: the boy is awake. The hour is up, the kitchen is a mess, and you are left wondering if you’d ever even made chili verde before.

Has this, or something like it, happened to you? Check out the wonderful website called Eat Your Books. This site indexes the recipes in cookbooks, lets you add the cookbooks that you have to your virtual shelf, and then allows you to search the recipes. Fantastic! Now, the site doesn’t store the actual recipes, but you don’t need it to – you already have the books.

I signed up for a trial membership in about 30 seconds, and within about 30 minutes, I’d added 67 books to my shelf. I can now search through nearly 11,000 recipes by name or ingredient, and mark that mysterious chili verde recipe as a favorite so that I don’t ever lose it again. There is also a social networking component to Eat Your Books, so you can have friends, see your friends’ bookshelves and recipes, add reviews, leave comments, etc.

Now, the site is in beta, and the indexing of books is still ramping up. So while I may have 67 books on my shelf, only 26 of them are indexed. Which means that I can’t search the recipes in the remaining books. Yet. You can request that a particular book be indexed, and the more people who request it, the higher priority it gets. Some of the books I own didn’t show up in the search results at all, presumably because they are out of print. Honestly, many of the cookbooks I have were either bought ages ago when I first became a vegetarian, or as bargain/remaindered books, so I’m actually pretty pleased that so many of mine were already indexed.

Does this seem too good to be true? Well… it’s not free. After a 30-day trial, you can buy a year-long membership for $25 or a lifetime membership for $50. That felt like a lot to me, but then my husband, Jason (of Icebox Pickles fame), asked me if I had $50 worth of cookbooks that I never used and never looked through. To that, the answer is, sadly, yes. The site is also ad-free and says it will stay that way. I can well imagine how much work it must take to index even one book, so it seems reasonable to me to charge a fee.

I’m giving serious thought to becoming a lifetime member, and in the meantime, I plan to fully explore the site. As should you. Go take a look at Eat Your Books. And if you sign up and would like to be my friend, my username is trikegirl.