Updated: The Cook's Illustrated Recipe Index


 
Chris Allingham said:
I've updated the spreadsheet through the January/February 2021 issue.
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LOVE THIS!
I have every issue of the magazine - so much great stuff but no way to find anything easily. I truly believe I could dump every one of my 100 other cookbooks and just eat well forever using the magazines - but I digress.

I had built a OneNote notebook to contain my favorite recipes - to live in the cloud - to include all of the cooks Ill. mag recipes (someday when I got around to scanning all of them and uploading them) as well as favorites from my cookbooks etc. I spent a good amount of time considering templates for the most helpful categorization and relative location of all the recipes - so I could easily search the notebook given the ingredients/equipment on hand - and other issues such as seasonality, etc. I've attached a listing below.

I'm interested in amending your spreadsheet to make it more useful - with subcategories, which would really harness the search and sort power of excel. for example - you have the main category of soups, then you look through them and there are several line items for chicken soup, as well as other things, but no easy way to find all the chicken soups - unless you sort through all the soups for the search word chicken - most people are not quite THAT Excel savvy; or for another example, there are 101's about handling chicken that is buried in the 101 category.

how about instead - the main category is the main ingredient, chicken, then the subcategory is Soup, 101, equipment, appetizer?

that would make it super easy to find recipes that you can use with your main ingredient.

here are some ideas I had for 3D search categories..... of cpurse - its somewhat personalized (e.g. my interest in meal planning for weight training) but that stuff can be edited/customized

What do you think?



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Hi Colleen,

I'm glad you're finding this spreadsheet useful. I want to be clear it's not my spreadsheet, it was created by Holly Hinman and updated over the years by several others, and she's responsible for how it was originally organized. I imagine it could have been organized in many different ways, but she decided to do it very simply. For now, I feel like I'm just a caretaker making sure it gets updated every so often. I'm not interested in and don't have time to take on a major reindexing of the content.

Best,
Chris
 
BFletcher said:
@Colleen Raftery, using your example of soups that contain chicken you could also harness the capability of filters...

View attachment 21806
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YES - GOOD POINT!

I saw a reference to "eat your books" and I'm also checking their Cooks illustrated index out (I assume the CI mag index on 'eat your books' includes the ingredient list, as it does for all the 20,000+ cookbook indexes it offers) - In the end - I was looking for a mobile way to find recipes, based on ingredients, in both my CI magazines and the multitude of cookbooks I own. Preferably for free - but I can live with the eat your books $30 subscription fee per year.

MY main idea that I was sharing above was to create a OneNote notebook (referencing this spreadsheet and my other cookbooks/recipes) which also holds ingredients that I can access while mobile, say at the supermarket.
 
I can understand your interest; I appreciate the value that Cook's and ATK brings. I toyed for a brief moment with a pivot table from this file but didn't have much luck, though I'm not an advanced Excel user.

Your recent posts prompt me to ask if you're familiar with the Paprika app; it's available as a mobile and a desktop app and it's fairly robust in my opinion.
 
BFletcher said:
I can understand your interest; I appreciate the value that Cook's and ATK brings. I toyed for a brief moment with a pivot table from this file but didn't have much luck, though I'm not an advanced Excel user.

Your recent posts prompt me to ask if you're familiar with the Paprika app; it's available as a mobile and a desktop app and it's fairly robust in my opinion.
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so I've been playing with it for about 1 month or so now - I have every 'recipe offering' input, classified by cook method, main ingredient, and then by meal classification, with other ingredients, since charter 1992 through mar/April 2021. I also attempted to grab the back cover, the how-to centerfold, and monthly food tasting and equipment reviews for each issue, though that entry is far from complete and I might have to offload to another spreadsheet, in the workbook. Even recipe-wise, it's quite huge. There are about 4600 entries. I didn't use filters or data validation because it was just too memory-intensive. Instead, I used columns for each entry denoting the cooking method, main ingredient and meal classification - so each recipe can be sliced and diced (pun intended) - filtered - from many different angles. I also added equipment, ethnicity, and alcohol requirements. My goal is to get it to print in legal-sized paper, or at least make it tablet screen friendly. The end goal is to load it into a one note notebook wherein each excel line is a notebook page.

heres a screan shot - its still a work in process

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Thank you to everyone who has worked to improve the index! Colleen, when you have completed the more detailed database, can you share it with this group?
 
I have the Cook's Illustrated 1993 Annual book, and there are the Charter issue (Mart/Apr?), but then... May/Jun, July/Aug, Sept/Oct, and Nov/Dec 1993 to add to the database. What's the best way to get this info to be added into the database?
Dan in Eugene
 
Dan T Eugene said:
What's the best way to get this info to be added into the database?
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Best way is for you to download the spreadsheet, meticulously go through each of those mid- to late-1993 issues and enter all of the data, then send the updated spreadsheet to me.

Next best way is to mail those issues to me, I can enter the data, then mail them back to you.
 
Sending now. I also fleshed out the Charter Issue with the embedded recipes like seems to have been done in the more recent issues.
 
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I just want to say thanks again to Chris, Dan, Colleen, and everyone else who has contributed to or enhanced this spreadsheet. It's truly invaluable to me. THANK YOU SO MUCH!
 
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