he story of Recipe Thief begins as an expression of frustration.  Time and time again, people go online to seek out a recipe and instead what they find is a tiny window of useful information that is overwhelmed by brightly colored ads for spiced rum, cleaning products, the latest in vogue drug, a giant pop up ad asking you if you'd like to have this recipe emailed to yourself that is in itself sitting on top of another pop up asking if it is OK for the website to send you automatic notifications through your browser, an ad for the latest SUV and then, amazingly, an ad for the exact website that you are currently visiting.  Often these ads are layered upon each other, each one with a "skip ad" or "close here" button.   And then as if you somehow hadn't noticed that all those ads were there, they tend to shift around and change positions when you scroll up and down the page.  The actual text of the recipe is relegated to a small, irregular patch of the screen real estate which makes actually following the recipe something of an accomplishment. And then comes the "color".  It's not just a recipe that you are getting, it's a heartwarming story about how this recipe will remind you of the maple leaves  in New England in the fall.  It's a promise that your family will give you a heartfelt thanks for the most flavorful beef jerky they have ever had.  Each recipe is a story unto itself, a tale of exceptional tastes melded with once in a lifetime experiences that will leave you with delightful memories for the rest of your days.  Yes, this potato salad is the one singular creation of humankind that will draw us all together and heal the planet. We get it.  Most websites are about making money.  About the only way to make money off of a recipe is to provide "impressions" to an advertising concern.  That's why there is an attempt to throw absolutely as much advertising at you as possible in as short of amount of time as can be accomplished.   The more exposures that a website can claim, the more money they make.   And it takes money to run these things. Another interesting fact:  The list of ingredients and what you do with them cannot be copyrighted.  But the "color" that surrounds them can... so the more fluff you add to a recipe the stronger your claim of copyright is, even though you aren't copyrighting the recipe itself, just the presentation of it.  And that's why there's all that non essential stuff added on. e just wanted a website where we could go and get the recipes that we wanted without having to wade through all the rest.  Add to that the goal of protecting a notebook that is full of loose-leaf pages of recipes that have been culled, reworked, and refined that are always on the verge of being lost to an accidental spillage or simply being buried under a never ending pile of junk mail, and the initial idea of Recipe Thief came into being.  But we wanted to do this with a few guiding principals...

here will never be any ads.  While we would not be opposed to some direct sponsorship for a particular brand of cheese or BBQ sauce, that sort of thing will always be clearly stated and will never ever be presented as an ad banner or pop-up or any technology that will get in the way of the vision of just being able to access a recipe without having to fight through a tornado of advertising. implicity will always be the guiding principal.  THIS SITE EXISTS ENTIRELY IN HTML.  There are no "Web 2.0" or "web 3.0" technologies being used here.  This is important:  WE ARE NOT TRACKING YOU, which is why you'll never see any of those pop ups asking you to accept the cookies on our site.   The only cookies we have are the ones we bake.  The only information we keep is the basic data that all web servers collect: IP addresses, which pages have been clicked on, and so on.  We will never sell your information to a third party because we have no information to sell to them.  That's another reason why you won't find advertising here: it is used to track you.  No tracking here.   Just recipes.  This site was created and maintained by a bespoke application that was written expressly for this website.  It does not use PHP, Python, Perl, Javascript or anything else.  In fact it doesn't even exist on a server anywhere at all.  All of our content management is handled off site. ecause of that, this site may look quite a bit more basic and primitive than what you are used to.   That's by design.  We just want to get the recipes out on the web.  Then, later, when we want to find them again, there they are.   No searching though old bookmarks, no dead links, no scrambling through piles of paper.   If the site is never used by anyone at all out in the world it will still have fulfilled it's purpose.  And yet, hopefully someone does find these recipes and uses them and enjoys them. f you have found the site useful, or if you hate it, or if you have a recipe you'd like to see posted here, or if there is a recipe you are looking for, or if we have made some kind of mistake, or if you are just looking for a pen-pal, then feel free to contact us at: recipethief@recipethief.net