Create Custom Cookbooks with TasteBook

I love to cook and I love to eat. So naturally, I have a lot of recipes printed out from various Web sites, and handwritten ones from friends and family. Keeping them organized is a pain, and when I want to share them with others, passing along a handwritten recipe usually means I'll never see it again. TasteBook is a new service that can help with these problems. You can make your own hardcover cookbook to give as a gift or sell, archive your recipes from other Web sites, type in your family recipes, and share them with friends online.







I have three binders at the top of my pantry that are stuffed full of recipes. I used to punch holes in the sheets and organize them by type of meal (dessert, meat, veggie, and so on) but after a while, I wound up printing them out faster than I could file them. TasteBook offers a way to take those recipes directly from the Web sites that I found them on, and add them to my own cookbooks online. I can organize a single cookbook by type of recipe, or I can make separate cookbooks for different food topics and share them with others online or reference them whenever I want a new recipe to try out.



The beauty of TasteBook is that I can take any cookbook that I make and have it printed out in color with a hardcover, include photos of the meals that match the recipes, and give the books as gifts. Using TasteBook, you can pull recipes in from popular Web sites such as Epicurious.com and add them directly to your cookbooks, add your own recipes from any source (including the note cards that your grandmother passed down to you), personalize the cookbooks, and share them with other TasteBook members.



Accounts at TasteBook are free (although printing cookbooks costs money), and you can create individual TasteBooks to categorize types of recipes by food or by topic. You can search the recipes on the site already and add them to your list of personal recipes, and browse other users' shared Tastebooks for recipes to use. If you have a personal collection of recipes that you'd like to include in a printed TasteBook or share with the world, you can upload it to your TasteBook profile and add it to any of your TasteBooks.

TasteBook started as a method to get everyone to share recipes and rid themselves of their binders and folders stuffed full of hand-me-down scraps of paper, but quickly evolved into a method of creating custom cookbooks and sharing and remixing cookbooks between friends and family. Since creating TasteBooks online, sharing them, and pulling recipes from other sources and uploading your own are completely free, most of the value of TasteBook is available without paying anything. Even so, once you have your recipes uploaded and organized into TasteBooks, you may want to try printing your own cookbook, if for no other reason to have all of your recipes bound and professionally printed for posterity.