Eat Your Books

Unsolicited endorsement: Every Saturday I make a menu plan for the week*. As inputs, I go with our current fridge and freezer assets as well as whatever’s coming in the next Ooooby box. Then I use Paprika to find recipes that will use up the most perishable stuff first. Paprika’s great for organising your online recipes, and we keep our old iPad in the kitchen to cook from.

That said, last week I was looking at our bookshelf full of dead tree cookbooks and lamenting the fact that we rarely cook from them. “If only there was a database that I could search as easily as I do Paprika,” I said to the Snook. “Oh wait!” he said. “I saw something for that recently.”

Less than a day later we’d signed up for a year subscription to Eat Your Books and loaded our 40+ cookbooks into it. I was happy to see that just about all our books were already in there, and probably 85% of them were indexed. Once you’ve logged your books, you can search through the recipe indexes by ingredient, type of meal, etc. So handy! Already we’ve cooked from our books three times since: Neil Perry’s Persian-style lamb stew, Jamie Oliver’s Crispy Chicken, and Momofuku’s Brussels sprouts with fish sauce vinaigrette.

Highly recommended if you’re in the same situation…

* The Snook hates making meal decisions, so I make the list and assign him all the more labour-intensive dishes.