Where can I find recipes online?
There are many, many excellent places to find recipes online. Here are five different sites to help find the recipe you need.
Epicurious.com is an old favorite. It takes recipes and compiles them from these magazines: Gourmet, bon appetit, cookie, SELF, PARADE, and Nutrition Data. Not only does this serve as a database of all the recipes published from the magazines, but there are also menus, activities, and videos.
Tastespotting.com is a new favorite. It’s a simple concept of fellow food bloggers sharing their best recipes. You don’t have to be a member to take advantage of all the deliciously looking recipes, but if you want to contribute your own recipes you do. Simply name a recipe or even a food item, and all the recipes tagged with similar descriptors will appear. When you click on the picture, you’ll be taken to the recipe. At the time of this posting there were 58,918 recipes and the count continues….
Although you may subscribe and pay for the services of America’s Test Kitchen TV, there are plenty of free recipes, videos, and past television show episodes to browse. Because all the recipes are tested in order to find the very best, this is a remarkable resource for high quality recipes that are sure to be winners.
Cooking Light is an excellent magazine that also makes great cook books based on their best recipes. When you don’t have access to a magazine or cook book, you can always head online to the online version Cooking Light. It’s free, easy to browse, and filled with tons of healthy recipes.
Another option for healthy recipes comes from Whole Foods Market. If you would like to cook more organically, this is a suitable site to browse through. Another nice feature found on this site is the food guide lists offering nutritional information.
This site is very similar to Tastespotting.com–the recipes generated here are submitted by the users. allrecipes.com thorough in it’s organization in that there are categories created for all that is found within the site. There are even activities–for example there’s a definite theme of Halloween found on the site right now during the month of October. The best draw to this site is definitely the application called the “Dinner Spinner” that may be added to your iPhone or iTouch. It let’s you play roulette out of your dinner menu!
I love this post, almost as much as I love food and cooking. The reason I love using these online recipe tools is that they leverage the social networking platform by including comments, ratings and pics from people who’ve made the dishes.
When I cook, I usually have an idea of what I want to make and then find two or three recipes online and combine ingredients and techniques from all of them into something that I think will work.
To make meal planning fun I highly recommend the Whole Foods app or the Dinner Spinner app for iPod touch/iPhone. You can lock in an ingredient and then search all the recipes that match that ingredient or other parameter.