Our favorite cooking and recipe websites:
www.Myrecipes.com
This website has over 33,000 recipes. It allows you to collect your picks in your own recipe box. There are categories for slow cooker recipes, Halloween, and kids’ meals.
www.food.com
This site is a cooking, eating and sharing food site. It has 20 million users every month and over 500,000 recipes. The site is “an active social network of home cooks who connect and share recipes, photos, cooking tips and food trends in real time.”
www.Epicurious.com
This Conde Nast site has recipes from Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines as well as Self, Parade and a couple of others. You can collect your favorites in a recipe box, watch technique videos, customize your shopping lists, or look up cooking and food terms in a food dictionary.
www.Foodnetwork.com
This site has the recipes from all its cooking shows, like The Barefoot Contessa. It has a feature called “In Season Now” which allows you to find main or side dishes or desserts using foods currently in season. You can collect the recipes you like in your own recipe box.
www.cookstr.com
This is a new website that will offer “great recipes from the best chefs and cookbook authors”. There are already many recipes, and one search option is “cost”. You can search for inexpensive, moderate or splurge recipes.
www.cooks.com
There are many recipes, and you can add your own. You can sign up for a Cooks.com newsletter. There is a conversion page, a diet/health report that can be personalized, and nutrition facts.
www.eatingwell.com
This site is geared towards healthy eating and cooking. It has lots of nutritional information. Selections like “Healthy Budget Friendly Entrees” are great for tight food budgets. Lots of food news, polls, and food information. I liked the sections for gluten-free cooking, and how to cook for celiacs. There are also printable coupons.
UNL Food
This is a very straightforward site, no bells or whistles. Sponsored by the University of Nebraska cooperative extension. Focus is healthy eating, using ingredients you have on hand, and low-cost healthy eating.
ifood
Started by San Francisco area foodies. Video based, health conscious, with interactive capabilities. With over 11 million hits a month, this site offers an easy way to learn cooking techniques.
Chowhound
Chow “is an online resource for food enthusiasts and includes expert editorial and an active community forum of knowledgeable contributors”. Besides recipes, they have instructional videos and a podcast.
www.Allrecipes.com
This site allows you to have a recipe box, share recipes and recipe questions with other site visitors. It also has great “how-to” videos.
www.rouxbe.com
This site offers on-line video cooking lessons and video recipes. Great for those looking for cooking instruction.
www.foodandwine.com
This site has all the offerings of the magazine: recipes, wine and cocktail guides and recommendations, restaurant and travel articles. The on-line additions are cooking videos, and slideshows.
Community Recipe and cooking sites- Crowd-sourcing:
These sites are similar to the ones above but the recipes are created by a crowd. They are “wiki” type sites, called “crowd-sourcing”, and allow tampering with the recipes on their sites. Most of these sites allow you to keep a recipe you post private if you can’t stand the idea of anyone changing “Mom’s Marshmallow Surprise”, but you are encouraged to make them public and allow free-for-all tinkering. This is all very “web 2.0”.
www.bakespace.com
This is a site based on community, or “gathering in the kitchen” as they put it. It views itself as a social networking site based on food. It even has Izzie’s recipes from Grey’s Anatomy!
www.foodista.com/
This site describes itself as “a collaborative project to build the world’s largest highest quality food encyclopedia”. Its categories are: recipes, foods, cooking techniques, and kitchen utensils.
www.food52.com/
This site’s founders believe that “the best recipes come from home cooks”. They are creating a community cookbook with this site. It is a combination of a “crowd-sourcing” site, and the conventional recipe sites. It holds recipe contests and cull the best from reader submissions.
Food Journals and blogs:
www.thepioneerwoman.com
This is an impressive, well-written blog (and now a successful TV show on the Food Network) that gets about 13 million page views a month!! Written by Ree Drummond, who envisioned herself a sophisticated city girl, but ended up living on a cattle ranch in Oklahoma, the mother of four children. There are many photographs, lots of information about her life, but mostly there’s the food. There are also MANY photographs of her recipe preparations, a startling number of photographs, as a matter of fact. I happen to love many of her recipes, the Tres Leches Cake for example. Worth checking out.
www.101cookbooks.com
Heidi Swanson calls her site a Healthy Recipe Journal. She writes about the recipes she comes across in her travels and everyday life. Some are from her cookbook collection, some she has created. She focuses on vegetarian, natural and whole foods and ingredients.
Big Girls Small Kitchen
Two women in their late 20s, Phoebe and Cara, provide recipes from their tiny NYC kitchens. They share budget-friendly healthy recipes and grand, impressive entertaining recipes – all able to be made in tiny “first apartment” kitchens.
*This site has been closed but the recipes and information remain available.
Check out Need Inspiration to Cook at Home Again? for more ideas.
