Cookooree helps you gather your recipes and share them with the world. Other sites feature recipes from celebrity chefs. Cookooree is for the rest of us.

Use Cookooree to swap recipes with friends, family, and people like you. Think of it as a crowd-sourced cookbook of tested and trusted recipes. So go on, collect and refine your recipes, reveal the story behind them, and pass them along. Or use Cookooree to discover new recipes through the people whose palettes you know and trust.

The idea started when an unlikely person made something delicious. This person—we’ll call her “Joanie”—never thought of herself as the cooking type. She thought cooking types were domestically inclined people, who delighted in spending hours in the kitchen.

But having once tasted the most delicious granola that she could never again find, she felt no choice but to attempt to recreate it herself. The result was (and still is) her most prized recipe: granola.

When you embark on a cooking odyssey—especially when you don't consider yourself a cooking type—something magical happens. You essentially become a cooking type. And like any conversion, you want to share that experience with others. (For example, you might post photos.) In fact, you kind of want to convert others, too. (At the very least, you might blog about it. A more extreme case would be building a recipe-sharing platform for her granola.)

Joanie wanted everyone to taste her granola and also make it. She was proud of her recipe and began pushing it on anyone and everyone. Granola, it turns out, is easy to make. Foolproof, actually. And people needed to know that homemade granola could be theirs, too.

And with that experience, Joanie suddenly began to delight in other people’s stories. She could now relate to her friend who mastered pizza, and the ramen expert she was married to, and "Liz" who pretty much knew everything about cookies. It seemed everyone had a perspective on something, and cooking was suddenly more interesting when accessed through the stories (and palettes) of others.

In the end, we’re all cooking types, each in our own way. Joanie likes to simplify recipes. Someone else may be an embellisher. Maybe you’re into weird fusions. (It’s okay. Don’t be ashamed. It’s safe here.) Cooking is what we make it.

We each have a recipe or two to share. We each have stories to tell. We each have a unique perspective, reminding us that cooking is both a way to express ourselves and a highly social shared human endeavor that connects us all. (If epic background music was playing, there'd be a crescendo right about...now!)

We’re just getting started here at Cookooree. We have big plans, with many features to come! Thanks for visiting.

Oh! By the way, why not try making some granola? It's easy and really good!