I like your site's presentation quite a bit more (ForkingRecipes just comes across as data carelessly tossed into Bootstrap), though I don't quite like how the food images are mostly obscured until you hover over them individually.
Understandable. We're working on a variation that doesn't do that. UX is hard yo.
Fork the Cookbook has existed longer than Forking Recipes, and we've done hundreds of user tests. It turns out users really like certain things, and so the current darkened background is a compromise on that solution.
We found out that users liked pictures, and also liked text (surprise?). In the next test we're doing, we're going to be swapping the order of appearance to see if the CTRs increase
We try not to call it Github for Recipes because that's not our target market (although other people have called us Github for Recipes)
We blog over at http://theforkingchef.com so you might also want to check that out.
OK, self promotion over