About Yasmin Recipes

Hello and welcome to Yasmin Recipes

If you are unfamiliar with Yasmin Recipes, please allow me to take a moment to introduce you to the site. The first thing you should know is that Yasmin Recipes is a blog or a personal website, created and maintained by me, Yasmin.

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. The recipes are all tested (often several times) 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

Several years ago I started writing down the recipes I had grown up with and posting them to my website. I had just turned 20, 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 millions of visitors each month!

For the first seven years of Yasmin Recipes, almost all of the cooking was done in my parent’s kitchen in Carmichael, California. In April 2010, most of the cooking for the site shifted down the street to my kitchen (also in Carmichael). These days I cook less with my parents and more often with friendsand chef Kathi Riley who cooked for many years at the Zuni Cafe and Chez Panisse.

Where we get the recipes

These days most of the recipes we post we are making up. If you look through the archives though you’ll find many old family recipes, and recipes my family has over 30 years pulled from cookbooks, magazines, and newspaper clippings. 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 open on the most recent 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 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.

Advertising and Amazon Links

On our book reviews, and in some of the recipes, we may link to Amazon.com to help you find where you can easily buy the books or kitchen items we recommend. We do receive a small commission for any sales made from these links. These commissions, plus any fees from ads that are displayed on the site, support the running of Yasmin Recipes. If you are an advertiser and are interested in placing an ad on Yasmin Recipes.

Photography

All photographs on Yasmin Recipes were taken by Elise Bauer, unless otherwise noted. Information about the camera equipment, techniques, and software used for Elise’s photographs can be found in this article.

Yasmin Recipes either owns the copyright or has the rights to use all photographs on the site. Please contact me to obtain permission if you would like to use a photo on this site (contact info is below). In general I don’t mind if my photos are republished on other sites as long as there is a link back to the recipe from which the photo is taken, and as long as the recipe itself is not also published with the photograph.

Use of Our Recipes

If you would like to republish a recipe you find here onYasmin Recipes on your own website, please 1) re-write the instructions in your own unique words rather than copying and pasting ours, 2) please do not copy our headnotes, and 3) please provide a working link back to the source recipe on Yasmin Recipes.com. I ask that you rewrite the recipes in your own words because Google penalizes sites when they see duplicate content on the web, making it more difficult for readers to find our recipes using Google search.

Book Reviews and Product Reviews

Once in a while I write about books or products I like. My current policy is to not accept free products or books for review (books by friends are the exception). If I review a book or a product it is because I have personally bought it, and either read it or use it.