There’s two things you can do with Everyday Cooks. Share recipes of yours, and Search for new recipes. Here’s more about how…

That’s the whole idea: sharing recipes.

There are a lot of cooking sites on the Web, and some of them have thousands of recipes. But Everyday Cooks is a place where real everyday cooks can share recipes they have tried and tested and know they’re good.

Sharing recipes

You share a recipe by clicking on the ‘Share’ button, and following the directions on the form to enter your recipe. The form is pretty self-explanatory, but here are some guidelines to make this easier and more sensible to you.

Marlys and Glenn will read every recipe you submit. We’ll edit them a little if needed to make them consistent with the format of other recipes, and then submit them to the live database. So, there is a slight delay between when you submit one and when it is posted.

We like to give credit. If you are sending a recipe that someone else gave you, or you got from a magazine or cookbook, please credit the ‘Source’. If your source is a cookbook, magazine, or newspaper, the title (and author if you know it) should be in the Source area, and the date of publication of the recipe in ‘Date published by source’ (for books, use January 1 as the day and month of the year of publication).

Along the same lines, we encourage you to let us publish your name and email with the recipe, but you may choose not to do this if you wish. Or, you can choose to publish your name but not your email address. In either case, the system will not accept a recipe that does not have a name and email address filled out, even if you ask us not to publish it. (We do this to promote responsibility—there are always a few, if you know what we mean).

As for the other fields, do your best. If you think this is a ‘low calorie’ recipe, go ahead and select that under the ‘Special type’ pulldown. Or, for ‘Level of difficulty’ just give it your best estimate. There’s no one right answer for these things, and you are the best judge of it.

Searching recipes

Everydaycooks.com has several ways to look up recipes (to search).

On the home page, you can roll the mouse over the ‘Recipes’ button and see the subcategories. Then you can choose a subcategory like ‘Appetizers’ or ‘Main dish—fish’ and the database will return those recipes. Or, you can just click on the ‘Recipes’ button and all of the recipes will be displayed in alphabetical order, and you can page through them.

On the right hand column of many pages is a Search form and a button for ‘Advanced search.’ The basic Search form is a keyword search: just enter the words you are looking for (e.g., ‘spaghetti’) and all the recipes with that word in them will be displayed.

The ‘Advanced search’ gives you some short cuts and a lot more power. You can combine search elements to look for more specialized or specific recipes—this helps narrow your search to the most relevant recipes. For instance, if you entered ‘tomato’ in the keyword search, you’d get pages of recipes because the ingredient is so common. But if you enter ‘tomato’ in the keyword form and then select ‘Italian’ under ‘Cuisine’, you get a much shorter list.

Under the ‘Advanced search’ you can also select more than one pulldown to narrow your search. For example, you could select ‘Italian’ under ‘Cuisine’ and ‘Fit for Company’ under ‘Difficulty’, and you would get all the Italian recipes that are ‘Fit for Company’ (medium difficulty in our scheme).

Remember two things: First, you cannot break the database or make it tired. Just keep playing around with it until the search tool gives you what you want. Second, if you ask for too many criteria to be met all at once, you will have a VERY narrow s