Chapter 1 Introduction

When I started collecting recipes as an online cookbook in late 2021, I envisioned a fairly simple organization - bread making, grilling and barbecuing, and everything else (“comfort food”). Very soon thereafter, I added a section on international cooking, as well as a brief one on drinks. So far so good, although I was already having to make choices about where to put things - for example, does chicken tikka belong in the grilling or international section?

This organization concept really began to fail when I started joined the Instant Pot® world in early 2023. Now, suddenly, I ran into a couple of big problems. First, someone looking for, perhaps, Indian recipes in the International section would overlook those in the IP one. Also, what about foods that can be prepared in multiple ways? For example, chicken wings can be grilled, barbecued, baked, broiled, or (supposedly) cooked in an IP. Rather than arbitrarily choosing a section for a particular recipe based on cooking method, wouldn’t it make more sense to bring all chicken wing recipes together with general guidelines for the different methods available?

Then I thought. Maybe the old way is the right way - organizing by food rather than by method. So that’s what Cookbook 2.0 is all about. I’ve tried to get all of the old recipes reorganized this way, hoping that that will be more easy for me to manage and for the reader to navigate. This is actually a bigger undertaking than it seems, and while when I took this live, I thought it was in pretty good shape, I’m sure I will be editing and tweaking it for some time to come.