Biographies of professional and amateur chefs:

This is a very short biography and if you want more information you can visit the contributor's website where you will usually find contact details. If you wish us to pass a message on email us.

Having come across another recipe site which I had not seen before, and being impressed by its sheer size and content, I made contact with Linda Roth the founder of RecipeGoldmine. Just call me nosey if you like but I love to hear the story behind the website so I asked Linda to tell us a little bit about herself and the site.

This is what Linda wrote for us. She has also let me have a number of recipes as an appetiser for what you will find at RecipeGoldmine and these you will find with the main recipe menus. Don't forget to pay a visit to her website (click here). Although some of her recipes have been featured on Hub-UK they are only a small sample of a truly superb collection of recipes.

After retiring as an office systems manager for a major airline and as a professional organist and pianist, I combined my life-long love of collecting recipes and cooking to launch my first web site. I had collected well over seventeen thousand recipes, almost fifteen thousand of which are currently on line.

My daughter, Lisa, who has three children, is my partner, and she has been working on a major re-design of the website, as it has not changed since it went on line in August 2000. It was our first attempt at HTML. Lisa prefers to use raw HTML, but I prefer FrontPage. We currently publish a newsletter four times weekly which reaches about seventeen hundred people. Having just changed servers, we are still working out a few bugs here and there.

Our idea was to have a site which is simply loaded with recipes and information. We have extensive craft sections for children and adults, world (ethnic) recipes, Classy Clones, kitchen charts (which includes substitution charts, conversion charts, wine and cheese pairing, etc.), gardening, children's recipes, home remedies, household hints, recipes for pets, food preparation, etc. - in effect, a total resource (with more coming) for the average homemaker.

The best part of the website for me is the very large Southwestern section. Since moving from Chicago, Illinois to Phoenix, Arizona in 1973, I have developed a deep appreciation for both the Mexican and Native American foods of the great Southwest.

Recipegoldmine boasts a resident BBQ Guru, Kevin Taylor, whose Team Double Smoke competes in grilling and smoking competition throughout the Midwest. We also have a resident gardening expert, Gary Beck, who is forever answering questions.

We like for people to have fun at our site, which is why we offer a message board where people can have their own personal and signature icons if they desire. It's a full time job archiving the wonderful recipes that are posted there, but it is well worth it. This message board also drives a lot of traffic to the site. Our posters pretty much have free reign there, but an occasional "bad apple" is zapped immediately.

We plan to put a great store on-line sometime in July or August.

I enjoy visiting other culinary sites, and I regularly post on several other recipe message boards.

I cannot tell anyone where I got my love of cooking. I know Lisa got hers from me. My Mother always disliked cooking, so we certainly didn't learn much from her. Poor Mom - she cooks because she has to, not because she wants to! When visiting relatives, I invariably end up in the kitchen, cooking day and night. When I visited my niece in Pensacola, Florida a couple years ago, no one wanted to go out to eat - they wanted Linda's home cooking - specifically Mexican food.

My husband has only had one question - Why do you spend fourteen to sixteen hours a day in front of the computer?

If you would like to visit the RecipeGoldmine website click here