How To Eat Your Books

How often do you want to recreate a dish you’ve cooked with me, but can’t recall which eMagazine it’s in? For that matter, how do you use all of the recipes inside all of the cookbooks and food magazines that I know you have on your bookshelves (I bet you currently don’t – most people only ever cook a handful of recipes out of any one cookbook)?

The answer is a very clever website called Eat Your Books which I discovered many years ago and use every week!

The EYB Team has indexed almost 2.5 million recipes in over 160,000 cookbooks so you can find the recipes you want when you want them. I love EYB and I want to share it with you so I’ve indexed all the Be Inspired eMagazines (27 as of August 2023 and counting) plus all of the recipes on this website.

Here’s how it works: You create a virtual bookshelf on EYB, add the book titles and magazines that you own and then search by ingredient, cuisine, occasion, etc… and EYB shows you which recipes you have on hand that match your search. You then grab the book, or open up the eMagazine, and there’s the full recipe! You can add recipes from your favourite websites too (including this one) and click straight through.

To get you started, the girls at EYB and I would like to offer you a free 3-month Premium membership.

Let’s get started in 4 easy steps (email me if you have issues and I’ll talk you through it):

1. Visit the Eat Your Books website – click Get Started – click create an account.
2. On the next page, under ‘Premium’ and ‘I have a voucher’, click ‘redeem’ – enter BIBR23 – click ‘redeem’. That should take you to the Library and offer you a tour of the site which I recommend spending a few minutes doing as it’s a great overview of how it all works.
3. Next, go to the Magazines tab across the top – click the ‘+Magazines’ button under Browse on the right – click ‘Be Inspired’ – click the blue ‘+Bookshelf’ button next to the top issue – click the blue ‘click here to add past issues’ (date range for all issues is June 2021 to the current month) – tick ‘Automatically add future editions’ – click ‘Add to Bookshelf’.

NOW while you’re here PLEASE take a minute to give each one a 5-star rating and a love heart – PLEASE it’ll only take a minute!

• Next click ‘My Bookshelf’ at the top of the screen then ‘Recipes’ tab under that and you’ll find all 457 recipes that have been indexed so far (I’ll add new ones each month).
• To find recipes, enter ingredients, cuisines, recipe titles or other search criteria into the search field at the top of the list.
• You can also use the lists under ‘Filter by’ on the right by clicking the + button next to them e.g. click the + next to Ingredients then tick ‘Fish & seafood’ to see a list of all seafood recipes – now refine the search by adding Italian to the search field above the list to see all Italian seafood recipes.

Wait – there’s more:
4. Go back to library (across the top) and select blogs – enter ‘food wine travel’ in the search box and click +Bookshelf when my Food-Wine-Travel website comes up.

Now you have another another 300+ recipes that will come up when you search and these all have a link to click directly through to the recipe on my website.

I’m going to ask again – PLEASE add ratings (5-star I hope) to all recipes and eMags as you go – it all helps other people find Be Inspired. And if you find an error anywhere or have an issue with a recipe – you know I want to know, so email me.

You can bookmark your favourite recipes, add notes (private or public) and even add your own recipes. You can also go into the Library section and search for all the books and food magazines you own and add them to your bookshelf.

In 3 months’ time when your free trial expires, you’ll be prompted to renew your membership – it’s USD$40/year and I highly recommend it. Once you have your books, magazines and favourite food websites loaded you’ll wonder how you ever did without Eat Your Books.

Thanks for cooking with me – I hope you love Eat Your Books as much as I do!

Roberta!