Eat Your Books

I wrote a piece for the daily food email newsletter Tasting Table about Eat Your Books, an interesting new website that can help you turn your cookbook collection into an online recipe database.

Huh? Online search for print? Read more about how it works.

More Details on Hesser's Food52

More details emerge about Amanda Hesser's Food52 website and "crowdsourced cookbook."

Is My Latte Hot or Not?

Can food and drink websites get any more niche than this? Rate My Rosetta adapts the Hot or Not formula to an online competition among professional and amateur baristas for the best latte art. To date, the site has amassed more than 3,082 photos of foam and coffee design from 496 latte art contributors.

A New Player in Recipe Search

Scripps Networks, the parent company of The Food Network, has quietly launched a new website that might just be a "killer app" for online recipe search.

Currently in "beta," Food.com sports a clean, almost zen design -- lots of white space, a bunch of carrots, a sprig of rosemary -- which stands in stark contrast to the brash style of its sibling site, the Food Network. Food.com is a vertical search engine for recipes and an online repository for recipe collections. Down the road, Scripps also plans to add social media tools to enable commentary and interaction between users.

Surprisingly, it's not just a search engine for Scripps' proprietary recipes on the Food Network website and Recipezaar (which Scripps also owns). Rather, Food.com searches all of the major recipe publishers on the web -- from epicurious to Food & Wine (it presently skips over blogs). Unlike these other sites, which search only within their own sites, Food.com's search has no walls. Aside from FoodieView, I believe it's the only recipe search engine of its kind.

twe⋅ci⋅pes

twe⋅ci⋅pes (noun): Extremely abbreviated recipes, published via Twitter, that provide cooking instructions in no more than 140 characters.

The Observer reports:

"There is a growing trend for people, including some leading chefs, to create micro-recipes - a single paragraph that tells users how to make an entire starter, main course or dessert - then transmit them via Twitter."

The concept is the basis for Twecipe, a new service and upcoming iPhone app that provides recipes via Twitter in response to queries with lists of ingredients.

See also: @twecipe, @twixologist, @cookbook, @tinyrecipes, and @gracepiper.