Cooks keep recipes the way writers keep a diary. We collect recipes as memories. But unlike a diary, our recipes are scattered and unorganized. We all need help gathering, organizing and presenting our recipe memories. Enter Salty Fig.
Applying the efficiency and organizational skills honed as a chef (not to mention as a wife and mother), Suzanne Florek has created Salty Fig, a website that guides you through the process of publishing and sharing your recipes. So I recently gave Saltyfig.com a test ride. The result is a new book of recipes from my ChezM Blog. You can download it using this link:
http://www.saltyfig.com/main/book.html?ID=26&user=9&code=zdtvcvlj#.TnNtNEvd6vc.email
Here’s a quick guide to creating your own recipe diary:
- Follow the directions on the Saltyfig.com home page: become a member so you can “fig in” easily in the future
- Press the “Recipes” tab and start collecting your recipes by filling out the recipe form. You may write in a recipe, copy and paste it in from another source, even enter a scanned recipe. Don’t forget to credit the recipe’s origin and credit your changes to the original. Click on SAVE when you finish.
- When you decide to publish some of the recipes you’ve collected, click on the ‘Books” tab and hit “Create a Book”. Select a title for your new book and click on SAVE.
- Go back to “Books” again where you will see an image of your book cover and title displayed. Select the “Edit” option under the title. A list of all recipes you’ve entered will appear on the left side of the screen. Add them to the book by simply dragging them over to the right side of the screen. Move them up and down into the order you want, add a photograph if you wish. When you finish. Press SAVE and your book is complete! (A purple line at the top of the page will confirm each time you save a recipe or the book.)
- Icons under your book title allow you to make your book public and publish it to Facebook, Twitter or send it out as an email link. How fast is that?
Salty Fig is Chef Florek’s first entrepreneurial step outside the kitchen. After training at the CIA (Culinary Institute of America), she rose to the level of chef at Spiaggia in Chicago and was involved in the creation of Tuttoposto (now sadly closed) before retiring to raise three sons in Western Springs, Illinois.
Salty Fig is Suzanne’s way of empowering the community of active cooks, food bloggers as well as the small food and farm businesses that publish recipes with their products. Suzanne feels our recipe diaries will forge links and shared knowledge more personally satisfying than recipes in mass-produced cookbooks.
Suzanne also intends for Saltyfig.com to become a recipe source in itself. She has begun to invite professional partners to make their recipes available to Saltyfigers (I like the sound of that.).
Not incidentally, I am her site’s first partner. A Chez Madelaine icon appears on the Saltyfig.com home page. A click on it takes you to Chezm.com’s home page. Click on “Recipes” and search for any one of the 500 plus recipes in the archive. A Salty Fig icon will appear on every recipe page. Click on it, and the ChezM recipe on that page is copied directly to your cookbook.
If you have nagging doubts about your technical savvy with a computer, just ask a friendly teenager down the street to walk you through the process. It will leave both of you feeling empowered
Saltyfigers will enjoy the best of both worlds. We can read our recipes as we would a written diary thanks to the speed and efficiency of the computer. What will we learn from this? Brillat Savarin said it best some 200 years ago: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.”
