Cowboy and I cook a lot. Maybe too much. Over the twelve years we've been married, we have tried out thousands of recipes -- usually 3-5 new ones a week. Recipes we like, we keep, tweak to suit our lives and cooking styles, and make over and over and over.
A couple weeks ago, my sister-in-law asked if we could please start putting those recipes on a blog with lots of labels so she could search through them. So I've started a brand new blog for that purpose, and I call it We Cook Too Much. Because we probably do. This is a bare-bones recipe blog -- no pictures, nothing fancy. Just recipes and a brief note from me on each one as I see fit.
I know some of my lovely readers also love to cook and bake, so thought I'd share the link. I'm adding recipes as I have time -- only have about a dozen there so far, but we have more than 600 recipes that we have tried and found worthy, so I will be posting more and more and more. Eventually.
...revealing my thoughts about movies, writing, and life to the audience...
Your recipes will be freed from their lonely prison on 3x5 cards! However, I don't think a blog is the correct data structure for sharing recipes. You have to manually tag all the ingredients, the search functionality is limited to tag or google, you have to reformat recipes you copy from elsewhere. If you ever decide you want your recipes in a different format, like a cookbook or a cell phone app, you have no Export feature. A blog doesn't know that "1/4 cup sugar" is a quantity followed by an ingredient, so it couldn't double a recipe for you or calculate the calories in the recipe (just two potential features that might eventually lure you to a different recipe entering solution). A blog doesn't let you rate by stars and sort by rating.
ReplyDeleteThe best recipe solution I found out there was BigOven.com. Recipe software is hard to code and many have flaws. I'm not a big cook so I may be unaware of BigOven's flaws yet. But I love how you can import a recipe from a URL instead of typing it out. I like how it has all the things I mentioned that software can do for you, and more I haven't used, like creating a shopping list from a recipe and syncing it to your smartphone. I believe it allows sharing recipes with your Facebook friends, or you can make them public by going Pro. As far as the digitizing challenge goes, any recipe you originally found online can be imported without typing, and Pro lets you send in photos of 25 recipes and they enter them for you.
I just think that as you embark on the solution of digitizing all your recipes, you want to choose the solution that will be the most useful in the future. For example, the recipes threads on the kcom contain a million text recipes, but I've found that I tend to use Google for brand new recipes instead. Why? Just because it allows me to search by ingredients I have on hand, such as spaghetti + eggs.
The blog format makes more sense for time-ordered stuff like "what I'm having today" or "I have 400 followers who will all try whatever I post this week," but not recipe storage in general IMO.
Actually, we have all of them on 3x5 cards AND as MSWord documents -- all I'm doing is copying them from the documents and pasting them into the blog posts. Requires a minimal amount of reformating, pretty simple.
DeleteBigOven does look cool, and I'll check into it a bit more when it's not 11:15pm on Easter Eve, but for right now... I like the control Blogger gives me, and I'm used to Blogger, so I don't have to set up a new account, figure out how the site works, etc. Plus, I'm not really doing this to share my recipes with the world, I'm doing it to share my recipes with Erika. I was considering not even linking to it from this blog at all, not setting up a Bloglovin' account for it, not mentioning it on Facebook, but I decided why not do a one-time mention so if anyone is interested, they can check it out. But the truth is, there are a zillion awesome recipe and cooking and baking blogs, and I lack the time, energy, and desire to compete in that realm.
But thanks for all your interest and suggestions! I will consider BigOven and see what it has to offer.
Ah cool, you're already digitized, and my argument about the searching is with Erika more so than you. I do want the recipes, but I have different needs than Erika -- since you have them all as files, could I ask you to just wrap them all up in a zip file and share them to me via email or Dropbox? If I find myself wanting the new stuff or more prep notes, I can check the blog, but I prefer them all at once.
DeleteRight! I've relayed your request on to the person who knows how to create zip files ;-)
DeleteThis is great news Hamlette. I will be looking for the recipes that are vegan friendly.
ReplyDeleteHappy Easter!
Happy Easter! I've been labeling the main dishes that are meatless specifically with you and a vegetarian friend in mind -- hopefully you can find something new to try!
Delete3-5 new ones a week, wow that's a lot! I set myself a goal ones to try one new recipe each month, but even that didn't work out... I'm lazy in a way, recycling my 20-25 tried-and-tested recipes over and over and over...
ReplyDeleteYeah, like I said... we cook a LOT. My hubby does nearly all the cooking on the weekends -- it's his hobby. So he tries out new recipes on the weekends, and I make tried-and-true stuff during the week. Baking is my thing, though, so I true out new baking recipes from time to time :-)
DeleteLooks great!! And highly opportune. I've been needing to mix some new things into the menu and I'm looking forward to trying out some of your tried-and-tested suggestions. ;-)
ReplyDeleteVery cool! I hope you find some things you like :-) Enjoy!
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