I am so sorry, Lifesaver, if I appeared to be accusing you of something bad. That wasn't my intent and I apologize for making you feel that way.
Recipes are kind of tricky things because we all cook and we are handed down recipes from parents and grandparents as well as friends. Also, we buy cookbooks and get recipes from there. And then, there are thousands of recipes on the net. Plus, to confuse things even further, we change recipes to improve them or to accommodate a special diet or just to suit our tastes. So where does it become "ours" vs someone else's? It can be very confusing. Like this recipe for example. You have a book from which you got it. But the recipes from that book have also been published on the net, exactly as in the book.
We are a cooking forum so, of course, we want to have recipes here. How to share recipes can be a bit of a balancing act. If you want to share a recipe that you didn't create yourself, you have a few choices. You can acknowledge where you got the recipe and/or it's author. Either the name/author of the book or a link to the site. You can also change the name and directions for preparing the recipe into your own words. Often, when we actually use a recipe, we discover that we prefer to do things a little differently or maybe we have some helpful tips to share. By doing that and including it in the recipe, it legally becomes
your recipe. Personally, if I use a recipe that I change to suit my family, I will give credit to the original author by saying something like "inspired by Jane Doe's meatloaf recipe" as a courtesy.
Does that make this clear as mud?
