sarahalley's Profile

I second the person who said that most recipes from mags are online. When I get a cooking mag, I take a few days to enjoy it, and then I pull up the recipe index from that issue on the magazine's website and pin or use eatyourbooks to bookmark and note which recipes I want to use. I've gotta admit I was highly skeptical at first but pinterest has been working really well for me in terms of keeping things organized, being able to search by keyword, etc.

I sometimes opt to bake dairy-free, and generally have good luck with using soy milk in place of normal milk, and in some cases subbing things like bananas, applesauce or pumpkin in place of butter, sour cream or cream. I've also grown to like using olive oil in place of butter in many muffin recipes. Until you're more familiar with substitutions in baking, I'd suggest finding a recipe that meets your needs. If you're a more experienced baker and don't mind failing a few times, just go ahead and try some substitutions on your own.

My British sister-in-law got me The Hummingbird Bakery cookbook a while ago. It's got a couple of great go-to recipes in it.

I always use equal amounts of onions and carrots in my tomato basil soup, with only about a cup of skim milk or soy milk. (No cream.) Using a blender or a handheld immersion blender leaves the soup thick with a great rich flavor. It's certainly not a "purist" version of tomato basil soup but every time I've served it people have asked for the recipe and are pleasantly surprised when they find out about the extra ingredients.

We have a binder with plastic sleeves where the original recipe cards are kept, and we've also scanned/transcribed the most important ones and created a printed photo book (which is nice because you can easily have more copies printed for relatives).

I've used a few of these apps before, but I'm excited to see some ones I haven't heard of on this list to try out. I know myfitnesspal is really popular and a well-designed app, but when I compared it to other tracking apps it was actually UNDER counting my calories on average- not a good thing! I've also used the caloriecount from about.com app with good success, which isn't on this list.