A playlist for your favorite recipes. That's how we're thinking of Tastebook, the cookbook-creator from Epicurious. Our site that covers technology in the home, Unplggd, recently mentioned Tastebook with a brief review of the website experience there. Well, of course we had to check it out too, and as daily users of Epicurious and their vast recipe database, we have to say that it's pretty cool.
The first thing you notice about Tastebook is their clean, open website...
...it's beautiful and clean, and well-integrated with Epicurious.
The basic idea behind Tastebook is simple: you have favorite recipes you make from Epicurious, or recipes that you've uploaded there to share with others. You'd like to have a printed, bound copy of these recipes in just the order and place you'd prefer. Maybe you want this to make cooking your favorites a little easier, or to give away to a newly-graduated sibling, or a new mom, or a bachelor friend.
At Tastebook you drag and drop your favorite recipes into their interface. Then, for $34.95 you can buy a custom-printed book with beautiful, glossy photos. This book includes up to 100 of your favorite recipes. If you don't have 100 recipes picked out right away that's OK; you can receive many of these recipes in credits, to be picked, printed, and shipped later. The books are binders so it's easy to add, remove, and rearrange recipes.
For certain audiences this is a great idea. Epicurious has a huge and well-tested database of recipes and we love many of them - especially from the back issues of Gourmet. If you like to cook from one book, or are trying to compile your favorite recipes in one place this is a good option for doing that.
And remember you can add your own personal recipes too. You can add your own recipes directly through the Tastebook website and drop them into a book.
One other feature of the Tastebook website is pre-made Tastebooks - created by the editors. These are books with a certain amount of recipes already inserted, usually along a theme, with room for more. Again - a great gift idea. These are also $34.95.
Does anyone have experience with Tastebook? What did you think?
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Heidi from 101 Cookbooks had awesome things to say about them, too, and showed a couple of examples in her post. It's here. And since it's Heidi, the photos she used are nothing short of amazing.
I'm seriously considering going in for one because my jumble of recipes are getting out of hand and I'd like something shelvable, and even giftable!
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I'm currently in the process of making a Tastebook with personal recipes, and it's very easy.
After two years of (slowly) editing recipes to make a book on Lulu publishing, I started the process there, to have them say they couldn't read my files??, but for something like $30 I could get software to translate my files! I immediately jumped over to Tastebook, which I had bookmarked, and started right in with no problems (cut and paste from my recipe files).
The only think I don't like is that you can't put a personal photo on the cover and divider pages (they do let you put personal photos on your recipe page, though). And that huge, glaring white box on the cover. And Epicurious on the cover. I guess I don't like the book cover.
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