10 5 / 2012
Announcing the New Foodfolio iPhone App
We’re excited to announce that Foodfolio is now on the iTunes App Store. Now you can really take your favorite food to go.
Recipes, Everywhere
Give it a try. It’s free and comes loaded with goodies. Take your favorite recipes wherever you are, or share photos of a beautiful dish on Foodfolio, Facebook or Twitter with a single tap. Best of all, you can browse Foodfolios created by other people and easily add recipes to your Foodfolio.
We’re creating the first truly social recipe box, where you can discover and keep food from friends and family you follow, or foodies with similar tastes. It’s not only beautiful to look at, it’s simple to use and packed with great features, including:
- Browse 1000s of free recipes by ingredient, keyword and category
- Keep your personal Foodfolio together while you’re on the go
- Add, crave and comment on your favorite recipes with a single tap
- Share photos of meals with your camera using custom designed filters
- See new dishes from other people and friends you follow
- Share your favorite food on Facebook, Twitter and email
Beautifully simple. Simply free.
Inside scoop: If you’re not a member, get the free Foodfolio app and sign up instantly to skip the invitation-only web sign up.
We’ve worked hard to make this the app that we want to use. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
24 4 / 2012
More to explore
One of the best parts of food is the never ending possibilities one can create from simple ingredients. That’s why we wanted to shine a spotlight on all the great food shared by other Foodfolio users. We recently redesigned the home page to make exploring new food easier. You can browse everything, what’s popular or food from people you follow. Clicking on the new ‘Explore’ navigation displays different ways to explore Foodfolio. Crave something? Simply hover over a recipe and click on the heart icon, or better yet, add it to your Foodfolio to make later.
You can still search for recipes from other users and on the web, but now it’s easier to find something that might just inspire you to make something new tonight.
13 2 / 2012
Creating a family recipe archive with Foodfolio
No matter how much food changes, or how many continents you travel to taste that perfect dish, there’s nothing better than a meal home cooked by a family member. But getting those recipes together, all in one place, seems to be a feat that no one wants to tackle. Partly out of fear of asking for that secret recipe, and partly because most dishes have been passed down from generation to generation without ever being written down, it always seems like someone else’s pet project.
That’s where Foodfolio comes in to create that family recipe archive. Consolidating all those recipes becomes as easy as pie, and getting to them even easier. Aside from simply appointing someone the sole duty of compiling it, here are two ways you can individually use Foodfolio to create a virtual recipe archive of recipes from family members wherever they may be in the world.
Common Tag: Like Twitter’s hashtag, you can create a unique common tag that goes with every family recipe. It can be a single word, like “obamafamilyrecipes,” or separate words, like “stewart recipe archive”. Every family can then search their Foodfolio for that tag and see only those recipes with that tag.
Following: Foodfolio lets you follow other Foodfolio members, and get updates of their new recipes. It’s a great way to connect and share with your family new and old recipes that you’re coming across, whether it’s online or off an index card. And if you see a recipe you’d like to keep or try later, simply click on the recipe and add it to your Foodfolio in one click.
11 2 / 2012
How to Get Around Foodfolio
What is Foodfolio? Foodfolio is an online recipe box (and soon iPhone app) loaded with recipes and pictures that people have uploaded themselves, saved from a website, or added from other people who are also on Foodfolio.
Public and Private. Foodfolio has a simple approach to sharing. Private is private, and public is public. If you want your recipe to stay private, mark it as ‘Private’ when uploading and it stays that way. Marking it ‘Public’ means anyone browsing Foodfolio and your followers can see and add it to their own Foodfolio.
Add Recipes by URL. You can import recipes directly into Foodfolio from supported recipe sites. Foodfolio currently supports recipes on AllRecipes, Food Network, and Epicurious. Adding recipes from these sites will automatically import ingredients, directions, serving size, recipe photo, and any other relevant info. Foodfolio then lets you customize the recipe and add notes. To import by url, click to add a Recipe at the top of the page, select ‘Add by URL’, and paste the URL in the textbox.
Manually Adding Recipes. In a perfect world, all your recipes would be digitized and in a form where you can access them from anywhere. Alas, many of the best recipes lie in scraps of paper, emails, recipe boxes, or in marked-up cookbooks. Foodfolio lets you add these recipes by hand, organized and searchable so you can find them later. If you know of any brilliant scientists working on a way to scan and import handwritten recipes, drop us a line :)
Search. Foodfolio lets you search for recipes just in your Foodfolio, posted by other people on Foodfolio, or those on the web. The search box is on the top right, and has a radio button for Foodfolio and Web. Searching in Foodfolio defaults to only your recipes.
Organization Freaks. For those who feel the need to control the chaos, Foodfolio’s powerful search engine lets you quickly locate recipes by ingredient, name, tag or category. You can mark your favorite recipes, create collections, and organize by category (e.g., Main Course) or tag (e.g., Alton Brown, To Try). Never lose a recipe again.
What is my Foodfolio Profile? It’s a food blog of sorts where you can share anything, from your recipes, photos, and bookmarks to that awesome blog post, like this one.
Find Friends. Under the Following tab, you can search for people on Foodfolio. If they are on Foodfolio, you can follow them on the ‘Following’ page to see what they’re cooking up.
29 12 / 2011
What is Foodfolio?
Foodfolio is about food,
and about the people who make it,
the moms and dads,
the home cooks,
the party throwers,
not the party crashers,
the dinner makers,
the meal planners,
those who cherish grandma’s recipes,
and learning from the past,
while making time
to discover new ways of doing old things
the curious ones,
the ones who care about ingredients,
who side with tasting vs just eating,
who don’t measure food by its pace,
fast or slow food,
but by how it’s made,
it’s about artisans,
the art of food,
the grill masters,
and masters of none,
about caring for the environment,
for others,
and for what’s going in your body,
and in loved ones,
but most of all,
Foodfolio is about giving,
and sharing food with others.
If you haven’t created your Foodfolio, sign up now. Best of all, it’s free to share your food.
02 12 / 2011
What’s In Your Foodfolio?
At Foodfolio, we know some of you love to capture recipes from the web to make later, while others prefer to share your food with others, while still others like to stay organized.
But we’d like to hear from you directly. How do you use your Foodfolio? Please email us the ways you’re using Foodfolio at stories@foodfolio.net.
We’re collecting this feedback for our own internal research, and your info will never be shared, never.
02 12 / 2011
Follow Your Friends and Your Gut
Recently we launched a new feature that lets you keep track of what your friends are cooking up. You can now follow friends and other Foodfolio members. Their latest recipes and links will then appear instantly in your news feed.
It’s a great way to discover and share what others are saving to their Foodfolio.
02 12 / 2011
The Beauty of Sharing Your Food
If food fuels life, then sharing your food, whether for charity or hospitality, is more than a mere gesture. It’s a universal impulse that should need no explanation. It also shouldn’t be a surprise that in many cultures, hospitality is one of the highest forms of respect. So why don’t we share our food more often?
The truth is that it’s one of those neglected facts of life, where it’s most lacking in the land of plenty and overflowing where food is scarce. In a country like ours, with a history more about gaining than sharing, the tradition is mostly non-existant.
If you’re not sure of the importance of sharing, try these:
Selfless. In India, the phrase Atithi Devo Bhava means “Guest is God.” It is believed that honoring guests equals honoring God. And after a recent trip to India, everyone from the taxi driver on down reinforced that idea. When a guest is invited to someone’s home, the entire family waits to eat until the guest starts. It may also be where the term “honored guest” comes from. Sharing does more than feed a guest, it enriches the giver even more. Like any gift, it speaks more about the giver than the one receiving the gift. The more you give the more you HAVE to give.
Charity. The act of sharing instantly gives a piece of yourself to someone else, which is by definition a form of charity. Giving to the poor is equated to giving of oneself. And food provides a lifeline to those in need, a fundamental part of daily life often lacking for the majority of the world’s poor and undernourished.
Diet-friendly. On purely selfish grounds, the act of sharing food usually means eating less, too. In group settings and family-style meals, it means waiting for others to eat before you do and taking your time to eat — always good advice when dieting. Besides, not eating more than your share inevitably leads to eating less.
Strengthens relationships. I love the term family-style when talking about sharing a meal, because it generally means there’s more interaction among those around the table. The fact that I get to sample all the food is gravy, which I’ll happily have passed my way. At restaurants, this is usually followed up by going dutch, which implies that the act of sharing is an equal opportunity giver. Eating family style frowns on those who hoard just as much as those who go solo.
Good karma. The concept of karma redirects that which you give back to you in another form in the future. If for no other reason, sharing your food is simply good karma.
Helps the environment. By eating you are taking something away from the environment, depleting it to quench your thirst and feed your hunger. Eating just enough to sustain you, while eating those things which do the least harm to the environment, means a more sustainable and healthier future. So in some respects, you are what you don’t eat. And on another level, it’s the environment that’s most helped by sharing, whether it’s sharing your harvest, seeds, recipes, equipment, you name it, nature is the ultimate sharing system.
There’s a wealth of resources online to share. The new breed of websites are all about sharing anything and everything. To learn more about tangible ways to share, check out the Sharing Solution Blog. To share your favorite recipes, you can try Foodfolio.net to store and publish your recipes online. And to share even more, you’re always welcome to send this to a friend. Who knows, maybe they’ll share something right back, like a dinner invite.
02 12 / 2011
The Story of Foodfolio
I grew up in a household that believed food should be shared and good for you. I carried that with me into college, where rather than eating the same drab cafeteria food, I decided to take up cooking (and possibly impress a date or two). And like many, this led to my eternal search to find new and interesting food concoctions.
The search started with mom’s decidedly “easy” recipes to familiar dishes from TV chefs. The hunt quickly grew and grew, where now I find myself spending more time looking for recipes and great food than actually cooking. The search seems endless; in websites, TV, bookmarks, stacks of printed recipes, cookbooks, you name it. I could have tried using an old fashioned recipe box, or even software-in-a-box to store them all, but they all seemed like too much work. Besides, what I wanted was not something closed and boxey, but rather a way to store all that I loved about food in an open and easily shareable way, like how food was meant to be — there’s a reason why recipes cannot be copyrighted.
So I decided to create a way to easily put all that food in one place, accessible from
anywhere and anytime. Post a recipe, a photo, a link to your favorite food blog, you name it — here’s my Foodfolio. But to be truly useful, Foodfolio had to be more than an online recipe organizer –Recipes are the means to an end, not an end in itself. Foodfolio would be your personal website where you could easily find, share and grow your food collection — whether it was a recipe, food photo or blog.
I wanted to do more than just read about food, I wanted a way to organize, make and quickly share my favorite food recipes and photos with friends and family. And most of all, I wanted a home to catalogue all that I love about food, a house that was open and social.
