Why foodies love email

I’m a foodie, and I love to immerse myself in anything food-related. Some of my favorite activities have included attending chocolate salons and shows, taking cooking classes in Vietnam, and picking cherries and peaches from local California farms. Over the years, my Yahoo! Mail has played a vital role in helping me grow as a chef because it makes the best recipe box. It stores recipes that I’ve found and personalized, it’s easily searchable, and it is the best way for me to share recipes with friends. Let me explain.

Store
I like to experiment with new recipes, and my email makes a perfect recipe box. Last week I had a craving for noodles in an Asian peanut sauce, and after some digging online I found a recipe that resembled what I remember my mother making from my childhood. The reviews were favorable, so I copied and pasted the recipe into an email, made direct edits based on the reviews I read from other home cooks (in the case of the peanut sauce, it was to go light on the honey and to add cayenne pepper for extra kick), and then sent it to myself. This unintended editing feature is something I actually really appreciate about storing recipes in email because personalizing recipes is important to me.

Search
Email is where I store almost every recipe that I have tried, liked, or aspire to try in the future. Searching through my recipe folder in my email is super-easy and fast, and it’s especially useful at 6 pm when I’m about to make dinner. When I’m at the grocery store trying to remember ingredients for my corn chowder, or at the farmer’s market with 4 pounds of gorgeous tomatoes wondering what else I need to make bruschetta, I’ll also use my iPhone to search for recipes that I saved years ago.

Share
Recipes are not only meant to be cooked, they are meant to be shared. Probably half of the recipes in my email folder have come from friends or people I met at potlucks/BBQs and other events. In a way, email has become my personal log of the people and events connected with a recipe. These days, I’m discovering new recipes and food ideas through my friends’ Facebook updates, often right inside Yahoo!Mail. Just the other day my friend updated her status asking for summer recipes that don’t require a grill. In the process of contributing my own favorites, I picked up a few ideas from her friends that I became excited to try. Into my email recipe box they went.

These are some ideas about how to use email to make your pursuit of culinary joy easier. Fellow aspiring chefs: Tell us how email has improved what comes out of your kitchen. Better yet, feel free to share your favorite recipes too! I’m always looking for new ideas.