I started this blog to reach out to the many food bloggers on Blogger. Eight months ago - while working in the monotony of corporate programming - I came up with the idea for a new recipe sharing site. Being a programer I didn't hesitate to try and make the site a reality. Eight months later Fridge to Food has been born.
The idea was simple. I was trying to live as locally as possible, using only what I could get from the farmer's market. But doing that was hard. I had to figure out, first, which ingredients were in season. Then I had to figure out which recipes used those ingredients. At the time there were not many tools to find recipes based on a list of ingredients. So the original idea was to make just that. I could have just made a search engine and stopped there. But I wanted more than just a way to find recipes based on an ingredient list. I wanted mouth water images that would help me decide which recipe to go for. And I wanted a vote based rating system to help in that category too.
The more I thought about it, the more I loved the idea. And the more ideas I came up with to add to it. I could create a sister site - Farm to Fridge - where local farms could post profiles of the ingredients they have and when. When you log in and enter a location (just a zip code) you could click on an ingredient listed in a recipe and find a list of local farms with that ingredient available. I could open up the ingredients to editing, so that the community could gradually build a database of which ingredients were available where and when. Eventually the site could become a hub for the local food movement, making it easier than ever to live locally and support your local food community.
The site entered public beta in August. For now its just a base set of features. An ingredient-based recipe search, a title based recipe search, the ability to post recipes, an image gallery into which any user may post a picture for each recipe, tagging, and voting for images and recipes. As users collect votes on their recipes and images they gain reputation.
Right now I'm working on building the collection of recipes in the database. Having a good ingredient search doesn't do much good unless there are recipes for it to search. And having recipes with image galleries doesn't do any good unless there are images in the galleries. To that end I'm trying to recruit food bloggers to help. Either by joining the community and adding their own recipes, or joining the community and allowing me to add their recipes for them. If you are a food blogger - can you help get this community off the ground? If you have the time, join the community and add your recipes. If you don't have the time, but want to help, join the community and click the box giving me permission to add your recipes for you. I would be very grateful, and you just might get to be a founding member of a wonderful new recipe community for locavores and foodies of all kinds!
