Highlights: My Favorite Recipe Sites
Comments (2) Its possible that I have an unhealthy obsession with recipes. It’s an excellent example of the way in which the internet enables my bad habits. Granted, I’d have plenty of recipes to choose from if I only had my cookbooks and magazine subscriptions, but the web brings recipe collecting to a whole new level. Today I thought I’d share some of the recipe sites I’ve recently discovered and some of my personal favorites. Feel free to leave a comment and add your favorite site to the list!
I recently discovered (and fell in love with) recipe search engine Supercook. Supercook is similar to the recipe site CookThink in that it allows you to select ingredients that you crave or have on hand and helps you find recipes that use that ingredient. Supercook has a few additional bonuses, however. The site encourages you to add as many ingredients as you have on hand, suggests additional ingredients which you might forget you had, and pulls your results from across the web, including Real Simple, Epicurious, Recipe Zaar, Martha Stewart, All Recipes, VegWeb and more. And Supercook lets you exclude ingredient categories such as meat, dairy, gluten, nuts or fish. I’ve already used the site to find a couple good recipes (including this one for awesome Key Lime Bars) and I think its going to be a go-to in the future, especially with our random CSA produce.
If Supercook doesn’t do it for you, Chow posted about another recipe aggregator, Yummly. Yummly doesn’t seem quite as simple to use as Supercook, but it does let you customize the taste of your food (salty, sweet, savory, sour, bitter), among other things. Also, there’s a social networking aspect to the site which could be fun if Facebook, Twitter and Foodbuzz weren’t already taking over my life.
On the rare occasion when I know what I want to cook, but don’t have a recipe for it, I consult All Recipes. The best part about the user-submitted recipes? Reviews from the people who actually cooked them, often including helpful substitutions or suggestions. So much better than attempting something blind from a cookbook. I made Spinach and Sun-dried Tomato Pasta based on the 4.5 star recommendation it’d earned and the rating definitely didn’t lie.
Really fun to look at, They Draw and Cook is a site which features simple recipes illustrated by various artists. They’re super cute and some of the recipes seem worth trying out. The site is taking submissions if you like creating art as well as food!
CNN’s new food blog, Eatocracy, is collecting heirloom recipes from readers. There haven’t been a ton of submissions yet, but seems to me there’s a lot of potential.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Evernote has completely saved my life in terms of organizing the recipes I come across on the web. I started using it over a year ago and I’ve got 613 recipes saved currently (I told you I was obsessed!) Many of my recipes don’t come from the sites above, but from the blogs I read every day (check out the blog roll in the sidebar!) I copy and paste anything that looks good into Evernote and then search them later when its time to cook.
I know there are a million recipe sites out there; these are just my favorites. Anyone have any sites to add to the list?
(Almost) Every Saturday, I choose a theme and highlight blog posts, websites and news articles from my Google Reader which I found interesting (and hope you do too!) If you want more reading, check out “What I’m Reading” on my sidebar. And don’t forget to add Relishments to your reader!
It was a shared kitchen/dining area, but as far as the kitchen’s concerned, that was it. All our appliances, dishes, bakeware, glasses, mugs, pots, pans AND food were kept in these cabinets. It was a little cozy.
Themocracy