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I just started using a recipe site called Yummly. You may have noticed that at the bottom of all of my posts, along with the Pinterest and Facebook and Twitter buttons, there’s now a “Yum” button. It looks like this:
When my blog was being redesigned last month I gave a lot of thought to what I wanted to focus on. And while I’m not a food blogger, I do spend a lot of time baking, some time cooking, and an insane amount of time both eating and thinking about eating. So focusing more on food seemed like a good way to go.
My blog designer mentioned that she really liked Yummly, so I checked it out and was immediately hooked.
Over the years I’ve saved a lot of recipes. A lot. I save them using my browsers’ favorites feature. Yes, “browsers” plural – I just save recipes in whatever browser I happen to be using at that time. I do tend to organize them into loose categories, but here’s what happens whenever I need a recipe: Lets say I vaguely remember saving a recipe for a pasta salad with olives and feta and some other stuff in it. Did I save it under Pasta? Or Greek? Or Vegetarian? And which browser did I save it in? Crap, I can’t find it anywhere! I’ll just search for it – didn’t the website have “Tuscan” in the name? Wait, did I save it under Italian? Arrggg!
Multiply that by every time I’m trying to find a recipe I haven’t made yet. I waste a lot of time. (Once I’ve made a recipe I tend to put it in OneNote – that’s a whole other post.)
But with Yummly, I can save recipes from any website and look them up quickly and easily a number of different ways. It doesn’t matter if the website I’m on has a Yummly button or not.
I installed the Yummly bookmarklet onto all three of the browsers I regularly use (directions are here). It took me about a minute to do all three – super quick. Now, if I see a recipe I want to save, I just click the Yum bookmarklet and it’s done!
The recipe gets saved in my Yummly recipe box, and here’s where things get fun: I can put each recipe in as many categories –called “Collections”—as I want! So, if I want to browse all of my Cinnamon Bun recipes, or Mac & Cheese recipes, or everything that I’ve marked Vegetarian, I can! I don’t have to worry about how exactly I’ve categorized the recipe since I can put it into multiple collections.
Or, I can just search my saved recipes from the “Search Profile” box, say for “peas” or “garlic” or “fried.”
I can make collections for party foods, foods I really want to try, foods my husband loves, whatever. I made a “Deep Fried” collection for when I want to pull out the fryer. I made collections for a bunch of different holidays.
Once I started adding recipes and Yummly started learning what kinds of foods I like, it started giving me personalized recommendations too, and I’ve added some of those to my recipe box.
Between yesterday and today I spent every spare moment Yumming every single recipe I’ve saved anywhere onto Yummly, and categorizing them. I think it took about four hours total, but it was over 600 recipes! And going forward I will save so much time not having to hunt down recipes.
I’ve also started my own SelfishMom page on Yummly. If you “Yum” one of my recipes, it will end up on my publisher’s page and in the Yummly search results so that other people can find it.
I hope you try the site out, I hope you love it as much as I do, and I hope you Yum some of my recipes! I’ve been going backwards through my blog and formatting my recipes so that they look real purdy on the web, so if you want to start with a nice-looking one, you can start with my Spaghetti Mac recipe.
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