Tastebook - Make Your Own Cookbook!!

If you like Epicurious, you’re going to love an amazing new feature provided by their partner, Tastebook.

If you aren’t yet familiar with either one, here’s the deal. Epicurious is a comprehensive site for cooks, filled with recipes from Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines.

The site includes a terrific search tool that can be used many ways. For example, you could enter the title of a recipe that you saw in Bon Appetit. Or you could enter a few items you have on hand and it will spit out pages of recipes with those ingredients.

So, let’s say that one day you’re wondering what to make for dinner and you have plenty of, say, carrots, onions and chicken on hand. You’d enter those ingredients and find 440 recipes, like these:

Pot Roast with Caramelized Onions and Roasted Carrots

Curried Chicken Soup with Carrots

Poulet a la Farmiere (Gratineed Chicken in Cream Sauce)

Or, if you want to make a dessert and you have chocolate, sugar, eggs and cream. Enter those words and you’d get 757 recipes on 76 pages with things like this:

Chocolate Pots de Creme with White Chocolate Whipped Cream
(I’ve made that one — it’s fabulous and really easy!!)

But, maybe you don’t have white chocolate…so try a different, yet similar recipe like this one:

Warm Milk Chocolate Souffles with Vanilla Ice Cream

Don’t have those little souffle cups? Then, how about this?

La Bete Noire

Okay, you need a springform pan and some parchment for that one…so…
maybe this:

Caramelized Banana Splits with Hot Chocolate Sauce

You can also search for recipes to find situation-specific recipes. For example, if you want to make baked french toast that you prepare the night before then put in the oven in the morning (say, for Christmas morning or New Year’s Day), you could make something like this:

Eggnog French Toast with Cranberry-apple Compote

I found that recipe by going to the advanced search tool, then selecting “Breakfast“ in the “meal/course” category, then clicking “submit” to get 813 results. Then I narrowed the search results by entering “cranberries” and “french toast” in the box on the left that says “search within results.”

Well, you get the idea…

If you want to rely on member reviews, you can prioritize your findings by fork rating (the rating system used by members), which I find to be helpful and fairly reliable. Member reviews give you a sense of how well the recipe really works and usually include helpful suggestions. You can also select specific reviews that you find particularly helpful and print them (along with the recipe) for your files.

Those are just a few of the features of Epicurious. If you’re more of a weekly meal planner, you can browse the gazillion recipes on the site, then save your favorites to your recipe box (which you get just by registering on the site). And, yes, they have a category under “Recipes & Menus” called “quick & easy.”

Here’s where it starts to get really good…

After you have recipes saved in your recipe box, you can then use this new service from their partner site called Tastebook and print up to 100 recipes in a beautiful, hardcover cookbook.

Yes, you’re going to pay for the cookbook, but you’ll get a personalized, custom made cookbook AND you can include some of your own favorite recipes. So, if you have a family recipe handed down from Aunt Sue, you can type it in, add a photo (hey, while you’re at it, include a picture of your kids eating Aunt Sue’s Ambrosia!), and voila! right next to La Bette Noire, you’ll see Aunt Sue’s Ambrosia!!

These videos explain how it works.

I am so excited about the possibilities of Tastebook. I could make a personalized cookbook to give to my best friend (who loves to cook and is quite proud of many of her recipes but also loves many of the Epicurious recipes). You could give it to your daughter as she goes off to college so that she’ll have the recipe for your amazing chili (and a picture of her eating it). These books would also be amazing gifts for newlyweds or new parents, filled with easy to make recipes or kid-friendly treats.

You select from 40 gorgeous covers and customize it with your choice of title. Here’s an example of one of the cover choices:

It says “Stealthy Healthy” right now, but you can customize that cover to make it say whatever you want. You can keep trying different covers until you find the one you like. Stealthy Healthy is one of the many cookbooks that Tastebook has created (that particular book includes 50 recipes). You can select any (or all!) of those 50 recipes to include in your customized cookbook. Other cookbooks you can select recipes from include some created by online bloggers (!), like 101 Cookbooks and Simply Recipes.

You don’t have to select all 100 right away, you can do some now and add more later. The book functions like a binder, so you can snap it open and remove or add pages. That feature is helpful for cooking, too.

It’s really amazing! If you like to cook (or know someone who does) you just have to check out the website to get a better sense of the possibilities.

Personally, I can’t wait to create my first custom cookbook!