What are your recipe sources?
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What are your recipe sources?
| Tue, 12-05-2006 - 9:26am |
Hi everyone,
First of all, I'm totally new to iVillage and this is my very first discussion topic - so pls do forgive any mistakes I make along the way!
Anyway, I'm researching where people find meal recipes and food inspiration in general. I've found a couple of so-called 'market intelligence' reports - but I'd much rather hear it straight from the horse's mouth (I'm not calling anyone a horse btw!)...
I'm guessing mopst of us source recipes in roughly this order:
- Word of mouth i.e. family, friends, colleagues, community sites like iVillage
- Search engines
- Cookbooks
- TV shows
Does this tally with everyone? Are there any other sources I've overlooked?
Would really appreciate lots of replies...
Thanks v much for your help!
Olidee
:D

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Welcome!
Thank you for the very warm welcome - I stopped here first cos I liked the way you guys sounded, simple as that!
As for your feedback that's brilliant, really useful - especially the bit about improvising. I guess in many ways our imagination is the most important recipe source of all isn't it?!
Thanks again, I'll be sure to stick around :)
What a great question!
This is my order: Friends/family, magazines, cookbooks, the web.
I have more cookbooks than any woman should be allowed to own, and I love magazines. My recipe box is chock full of recipes that I have been given or have pulled out of magazines. Each mag that I get, I have to try at least one recipe from. My favorite mags for recipes is Southern Living and Quick Cooking. Southern Living does a spectacular job of offering a variety of recipes each month, most of which are not too complicated or obscure; my biggest pet peeve of mags is when the recipes call for strange ingredients. Quick cooking is compiled of recipes from readers, and I love reading their own words about how a recipe is special, or how they developed it. Tweaking and changing recipes is what I do best. When I read something I automatically think "this would be better if I used x ingredient instead of y, how about adding x to y", etc. I also change methods in recipes often. Sometimes they are written with ridiculous steps or ways of doing things that I am not accoustomed to. My tweaking goes back decades and I have had many failures from it, but the successes are wonderful.
My cookie dough is famous. I work part time for a meal preparation service where people come and assemble freezer friendly meal, or we assemble the meals for people to pick up and put in their freezer. It is great fun and I love working with the owner on developing new recipes. The owner is a friend of mine who has been on my Christmas cookie list for years (approx. 400 dozen cookies each year leave my kitchen), she asked me to sell my frozen dough balls to her customers. Well it was very successful and needless to say, all of my free time was spent making cookie dough to sell. People would always ask me for my recipes and I would share; by no means am I a secretive baker. After about a year of selling my dough, I decided to give it up. It was very time consuming and it broke my heart to have my daughter pull on my apron string and ask if I was ever going to bake some cookies for her and her brother or was I just going to sell the dough.
After doing some research, I decided to start a baking website to share all my recipes and tips. http://www.fortheloveofbaking.com . I have been doing that for about 2 months and I am having a ball. For a technically illiterate person like myself it is very empowering. The neatest thing about it is that people from all over the world are sharing their recipes with me to publish on the site. My latest is a person from Israel just submitted a recipe for Russian Strudel. This weekend I will test it out and if all goes well I will publish it next week.
I think people are most likely to try new recipes if they are given them by friends or if they can relate to the recipe author. If someone can relate to a cookbook author they will trust them and try their stuff out. Same goes for magazines and the internet, if people find that they have a bond with the mag or if "real people" contribute, people are more likely to give the recipe a chance.
Ok, I've been blabbering for a while. I look forward to hearing everyone else's response to your great question.
Happy Baking
Mary the baker
http://www.fortheloveofbaking.com
Mary, your website is fantastic!!!! I have added it to my favorites and I plan on using allot of your recipes. Thank you for sharing your recipes, tips and techniques. Your warmth and love shows through on your site. I love that~ Thank you~
Tina
Tina,
You are so sweet, thank you for the nice words about my website. Your message really made me smile. I love your screen name, by the way. Us moms need all the ego boosts that we can get, so it is greatly appreciated
This how I get my recipes:
Using Google, many weird and fun things can found there.
Go through my 60+ cookbooks,
HI MARY!
Oh yes, I enjoy the banter and the funnies! It's great to be able to offer advice as well. I'm sure you are familiar with that, the advice that I have read from you seems always on target. By the way, thanks for giving Granny Diane solutions.
Mary
http://www.fortheloveofbaking.com
I Maine!
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