Cookbook rationale

I like to cook. A lot. Since early college, I have kept a collection of recipes handy in a document, first of family recipes I missed from home, then of especially good recipes I found online or in cookbooks, and finally of recipes I invented myself. The list became quite long from all these additions, and most of them I never actually referenced, or did rarely at best.

For the last decade or so my recipe list took the form of a long and cumbersome google doc, which was frankly an awful way to store them. It was hard to parse through, took a long time to load, wasn’t readily available to share, and if my phone closed while I was making something I often had to start from the top of the document and find the recipe again.

I’ve been searching for another way to do things for a while, and haven’t found something exactly to my liking for one reason or another. Thus was born my idea for hosting all my recipes on my website. I could ensure my recipes were categorized, searchable, displayed well on any of my devices, and easily shareable. I could also download or print a single formatted recipe easily when needed.

I will admit that my cookbook has not fully realized my (lofty) goals, but it’s a lot closer to them than my google doc was. Recipes are organized by tags such as ‘appetizer,’ ‘main,’ or ‘vegetarian,’ which is a broad and ambiguous way to filter but does have the benefit of making it easy to readily see things to make with a particular constraint.

Each recipe consists of an optional short story or history of the dish; I know this encroaches upon the infamous and much maligned recipe-blog format, but I’ve kept them as concise as I possibly can, and some of them are important for me myself as a living document of my food traditions. They are followed by a list of ingredients. I have tried to scale portions to use whole purchase quantities–no half cans, quarter packages, etc. where I can avoid it. Finally, the instructions. I try to keep them to a discrete single step, informative, and using qualitative descriptions (cook until deep golden color) rather than using prescriptive instructions like “cook 5 minutes,” which can lead to much more variation in the final product.

Porting all of my recipes is a slow and intermittent process, so things will take a while. If you know me personally and want a specific recipe let me know, and I will transcribe it as soon as I can! Also, if anyone besides me uses this, please let me know if there are typos, unclear instructions, etc.