Is it time for a recipes forum, or at least something within a forum?

I wrote to Anne Miller yesterday and in a classic corporate move, she batted the ball back to me.  Get your bats ready. . .

My message to Anne, repeated below, suggests that Permies start collecting recipes in one place rather than in separate threads, and defines a few good reasons why it's better for you and for your members to collect them that way.  Please seriously consider this concept. If you want to expand or better define it, I'm prepared to help. You guys are brilliant and have taught me a lot in a short period of time. Cooking and eating the fruits of Hugelkultur farming -- regardless of whether you have one raised bed (like me) or an acre of them -- rocket heating and ovens, and (I hope) canning and preserving can go a long way to extending the dialogue you have with your members. Thanks for listening.

Hello Anne,

I'm writing to you because you are the Forum Leader for Cooking. I'm relatively new here but I do root around a lot. I recently posted in Kitchen in the "quarts vs quarts vs cups" thread, and at that same time posted a recipe that I hoped would prove my point.  That got me thinking that there is no central location for recipes in Permies.com. (If there is, please point me to it.) I can appreciate that it's not a central theme for all y'all, but it is one of the results of all that you do "in here." There are a few other reasons to have recipes centrally located. You sell a lot of merchandise and there is no reason why a cookbook couldn't join that list. It's a way for people to share something else that they do. It engages your audiences in a different way. And, everyone eats better.  It could also include recipes for homemade cleaners or other items of interest.

I've organized my recipes into these folders: Appetizers, Bread, Dressing/Salad/Sauce/Soup, Herbs/Spices, Homemade Cleaners, Savory, Sweet, Vegetables/Vegetarian. Within Savory, I've started each recipe with the name of the main ingredient, so all the Beef, Bison, Chicken, Fish, Lamb, Pasta, Pork, Turkey or Venison recipes get clumped together. I have 161 recipes under Savory and this is a really good way to sort them.

Anyway, please consider creating a forum (or whatever) under Kitchen (or wherever) so that this valuable resource is not lost or scattered over all the forums. If you need help with that, I am prepared to assist.  

Thanks for listening,
Barbara Manning

Have you run across the cooking forum? It is not separated out and organized as you describe your folders, but there are a lot of recipes in there.

Now, if you need another cookbook on your shelf at home, I highly recommend our Kate Downham's A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen. She wrote it so the recepies can be used in a regular kitchen too. Link for international orders. Amazon link for USA.

R Ranson has written the book Clean With Cleaners You Can Eat available here on Permies.

I own both of these books. When I purged my cookbook collection so I could walk through my house, these are among the few I kept. They are excellent. Just in case you missed it in your reading of Permies, the awesome staff members are volunteers.

This is very much like something I want to experiment if I can find the time.  It would take a lot of time, probably a few months, to get started.  There's so much to do on the farm right now that I haven't been able to start.

The cooking forum is great, but often we have giant threads on a topic with lots of recipes within.

I was thinking as a way to make it easier to find recipes (and google as well as us), make a recipe forum and each thread would be about a specific dish.  

For example, right now we have a massive thread filled with recipes for dry pulses.  What I would love to do is to make more specific threads like one for refried bean recipes and another for peas porage.  Then gather up people's favourite recipes in each.

To make a new forum, we need the threads made first (for complicated reasons).  We need at least 50 threads to get started.  

With the projects I've got going on, I haven't the time for this.  But anyone can make a thread and if a few people wanted to work on this, I could do the fancy admin buttons when the threads are made.  

Yes, thanks. Discovering the cooking forum is what put this idea into my head.  But like the recipe that I posted, you practically have to review every post to find the recipes. I was hoping for something a bit more organized around the cooking aspects.

Perhaps all we really need is what R. Ranson is suggesting, a way to tag or flag a recipe within a post, and a way to recall them all or just a portion of them based on the tag. If we take the decision "never go backward" creating the tags to use for recipes from this point forward would be easy.  Of course, contributors should be able to go back and tag their posted recipes but it would take quite a bit of the burden off us.

If you prefer to think of this project as gathering what we have and classifying it, I have the time and can help, but I'd need some guidance.

Personally, I like the flags or tags concept. Recipe/beef, recipe/pork, recipe/bread etc. In my mind, I see that if recipe posters also tag their copy, then anyone in here can look up that tag and it returns all the bread recipes tagged with recipe/bread.  Not a cookbook, not a new forum, but a way to slice and dice the data in here in a unique and helpful way.   I don't code, but I know enough about it to be dangerous.


R.  Ranson thanks for the link to your farm. My niece knits so I'm sending her your link.