Yesterday I discovered an amazing website called Eat Your Books. It’s an online library full of your favorite cookbooks. Add them to your digital Eat Your Books bookshelf and voila! All of your cookbooks become searchable by ingredient, author, book title or recipe name. The entry level membership, which allows you to add 5 cookbooks to your shelf, is free. An unlimited shelf is $2.50 a month or $25 a year. There’s also a bookmarklet that lets you add recipes to your bookshelf from any website — I’m looking forward to transferring my Epicurious recipes here so I can have everything under one roof — and there’s also a blog and opportunities to engage with Eat Your Books through social media, so you can stay connected to other people who care about food.

I am a luddite. I love holding a cookbook in my hands. I like the experience of flipping through the pages, and I love getting lost in the food porn of it all, either through the pictures or through the sensual experience of handling a book. But even I have to admit this Eat Your Books is ideal for the TFRL lifestyle. It makes it easy to search for (and whip up) a recipe from whatever ingredients I have lying around — a must for busy weeknights and lazy weekends. Of course, the whip up what you have approach requires you to improvise, substituting the ingredient you have for something similar that’s called for, or even skipping ingredients you don’t have that you’ve deemed non-essential, but I’ve found that trying out a recipe, even in a compromised form, is a great way to find new additions to our family repertoire.

IMAGES via Eat Your Books

Tags: Eat Your Books, Food, Recipes, TFRL, TFRL Lifestyle, The Life