Fridge to Food is a collaborative cookbook. Okay, what the heck does that even mean? It means that Fridge to Food is a tool to help people who cook find recipes and share recipes. The idea is to provide a place on the internet where people who make great recipes can share them with people who want to cook, eat and photograph great food. And then provide the tools so that together we can all then index them, categorize them, tag them, rate them and keep track of them. The result will hopefully become the greatest collection of recipes and food photographs ever produced. Eventually, if someone comes along looking for a vegan, raw, gluten-free recipe for ratatouille that uses cucumber, zucchini and pumpkin - we want them to be able to find it.

It's designed to leverage the talents and knowledge of everyone who likes to cook and eat food all over the world. Someone in Mumbai can post a recipe for their favorite dish. Someone with a great camera and an eye composition in Leeds can cook it up, plate it, snap a couple of beautiful shots and add them to the recipe. Then the whole world can drool over it, cook it and give both cook and photographer a big thumbs up and reputation.

In addition to the collaborative cookbook nature of Fridge to Food, we hope to eventually add a sister site with profiles of farms and farmer's markets. When you search Fridge to Food to find an excellent recipe, you'll be able to search the sister site to find local sources for that recipe's ingredients. We want to make it as easy as a web tool can to cook great food for yourself at home from local, sustainablely produced ingredients. If that isn't your cup of tea, however, we're just as happy to help you eat great gluten-free food at home. Or great vegetarian food. Or great artery-clogging, heart attack inducing, football watching food (though we'd recommend against doing that too often).

Fridge to Food started quite simply, in the kitchen of Daniel and Michelle. It was a Friday night and the time had come to make dinner. Neither Daniel nor Michelle had the energy to go out hunting for ingredients. Nor did either want to go spend money on a restaurant made meal. No, the plan was to do the best they could. With just the ingredients already in their fridge. But there was a problem with this plan. Those ingredients didn't seem to go together.

"No problem!" thought Dan, "we'll just go online and see what we can find."

But, as luck would have it, none of their trusty web-based recipe sources could help. None offered a way to find recipes based on the ingredients used. "Why don't any of these websites offer an ingredient-based search? Even I could write one of those!" After long minutes of unsuccessful searching and much frustration, they gave up.

Then lightening struck.

"Why don't I just write one? I am a programmer after all!"

Michelle had only one response, "Yeah! Why don't you?"

"All right, I will!"

The discussion turned quickly to other features that were missing from the recipe websites of the time.

"I'd love to see a vote-based rating system."

"Why don't more of these recipes have pictures?"

And Fridge to Food was born. The night ended on a stir fry of ingredients that had probably never been, and probably never again will be, together.

Daniel Bingham has been programming since he was 13 years old. His first computer language was C++, though when he was first starting he mostly wrote C style code. It has always been his dream to found a software start up. His other dream has been to live on a farm and be as self sufficient as humanly possible. Those two dreams haven't always meshed well, but Fridge to Food seems an excellent start. He went to Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he completed a double major in Physics and Computer Science. It was there he met Michelle and she inspired him to really eat, and thus to cook, for the first time in his life. Until then he'd grown up eating excellent home cooked Italian food, but had never truly understood and appreciated how wonderful this really was. For the last six months the two have been living together in Thailand where they have been teaching in an English language immersion program. However, Daniel is on his way back to the states to work full time on Fridge to Food.