March 22nd, 2011

Sorry for not blogging. My excuses are Hedgehogs, Cardmaking and writers block. And Brian will tell you it has also been Facebook. LOL I do like playing Country Life and Zoo.

  I don't know if you all have heard of Amazon's Kindle. I thought since I was starting to get back into reading again, that one for us would be a good idea...... Needless to say, one wasn't a good idea..... But Two were!!! You really can't be borrowing the same book that someone else is reading at the same time. Now you are probably wondering why on earth is she going on about a Kindle on a cooking blog...... I have found a great use for my Kindle. Cookbooks and recipes!!!! There aren't alot of cookbooks available yet for it, but they are coming and I have a few of them already. I like finding the freebies and when they are found are immediately downloaded to my kindle. But recently I have been thinking of all the recipes I have saved on my computer..... I usually print the recipe off and then take it down stairs to try cooking..... Not anymore! I download them to my Kindle now and use it as a cookbook. I am in the new stages of testing this new way of keeping recipes so I will let you all know how I get on. If you do get a kindle or other e reader as they are called I can recommend you download a program called Calibre to help convert your files to the mobi format that kindle uses.
  Also Calibre gives access to a few free magazines and newspapers one of which is Epicurious. There is another one too that I like called Big Oven, but for some reason it isn't downloading now. I will need to figure that one out later. I did try one of the recipes from the Big Oven download that I did have and it turned out really nice. They also have a web site that you can get recipes from..... http://www.bigoven.com/  
This is the recipe I tried and it turned out really yummy!!! We also had fresh homemade rolls to go with it and a grating of parmesan cheese. :)
White Bean, Spinach and Pasta Soup .

  Not only can you use the Kindle to keep cookbooks on, and your recipes, but the ones we have can access the internet too...... So I can also read blogs and google other recipes on it. And it is alot smaller than most cookbooks. I haven't found the limit yet of how many books I can store on it yet. And you can always keep them backed up on your computer too. But I can see loads of possibilities for this little machine in the kitchen. The only draw back to the Kindle is that it doesn't do colour..... but they are working on that!