About Simply Recipes

If you are unfamiliar with Simply Recipes, please allow me to take a moment to introduce you to the site. The first thing you should know is that Simply Recipes is a blog or a personal website, created and maintained by me, Elise Bauer. Unlike most of the large recipe sites that you might find on the Internet with tens of thousands of recipes, Simply Recipes is my personal website, with only a few hundred recipes, all tested by me, my family or my friends. We invite you to try the recipes, and if you would like, leave constructive feedback in the comments. Do you have a recipe binder or box of recipe index cards? Think of this site as our family sharing the recipes in our recipe binder with you. As we cook the recipes multiple times, we often think of improvements and update the recipes. So keep in mind that what you see here is a work in progress.

How we got started
A few years ago I started writing down the recipes I had grown up with and posting them to my website. I had just turned 40, and had spent most of my adult life working as a hectic Silicon Valley consultant with little time to cook, let alone learn how to cook beyond what I had learned growing up. I come from a big family - six kids - and thought what a terrific family project, to document our family recipes! Both my mother and father are excellent home cooks, mom by necessity to raise us all, and dad because he loves to eat well and enjoys the experimentation of trying out new recipes.

Well, the family recipe blog that started in 2003 has blossomed and taken on a life of its own. Simply Recipes now reaches tens of thousands of visitors each day and was voted Best Food Blog Overall in the 2006 Food Blog Awards.

Where we get the recipes
Many of the recipes are old family recipes, many we make up, and many of them are those that we pull from cookbooks, magazines, and newspaper clippings we've collected over 30 years. If we have pulled a recipe from another source, we try to attribute that source where we can (sometimes it's hard when you only have a clipping.) The recipes shown here use mostly whole food ingredients and only occasionally a few things from cans or prepared foods. We believe in a varied, healthy diet, using real butter, real cream, eggs, lots of green vegetables, and protein from meat, fish, beans, and cheese.

About comments
Comments are welcome on most of the recipes and posts. I would ask that if you would like to leave a comment that you think of this website as my family's home and that you wouldn't say anything on this site that you wouldn't, as an invited guest, say in someone's home. Constructive criticism is welcome, as we all benefit from such advice. Rude, mean, or obnoxious comments are not welcome and will not be approved to post (that's me, gently escorting the misbehaving guest out of the house). Please restrict your comments to the topic at hand, for the benefit of all who may be reading.

Press
Simply Recipes was noted in Time Magazine's 50 Coolest Websites of 2006 as being a "great resource for cooks". We aspire to be just that, a great resource for you and others who love to cook. For more press mentions see the Press and Awards section of the website.

Nutritional Information
One often requested feature is to provide the nutritional information (calories, points, etc.) for the recipes on this site. Unfortunately, we have neither the time nor the expertise to provide this analysis. Simply Recipes is a reflection of how our family cooks and eats, and as we do not analyze nutritional information for our meals, it is not done for the site.