FOOD is on the INTERNET

Here's how you find decent recipes online:


Skip the egg advisory board

The absolute worst recipes I’ve seen posted on the internet are from websites like the South Carolina Department of Agriculture or the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. They want you to use pre-made French onion soup packets and frozen pre mixed whatever crap. They’re designed for the overworked overburdened overmedicated housewife. If you want to respect the ingredients they’re trying to hawk, there are tons of better places to look.

On the plus side, these kind of websites tend to have pretty decent charts on cuts and the like. Study them if you’ve got the free time.

Wiki recipes is useless.

It’s disorganized. That’s my main gripe, the Wiki format as adopted by the recipes wiki just doesn’t cut it. The disorganization shows: where easy appetizer recipes range from mixing strawberries and yogurt for a ‘dip’ to using a pressure cooker (for those beginners out there remember this line from the simpsons: “How do I use the Pressure Cooker?” - “Don’t!”) In addition to that, a great deal of the recipes are retreads - either copied from celebrity cook books, the egg advisory council (see above) - basically, you spend a lot of time sifting through useless information to find something useful.

Which is sort of the opposite of Wikipedia - where you can click on one link and keep finding interesting links until your face melts off and your bones decay. It’s a shame, really, but skip the recipe wikis.


Use websites that have a consistent format.

I can’t stress how important that is in the whole “cooking edible food” process. Hopping between standards of measurement, having everything crunched together in one “process” paragraph, alternating between words to describe the same technique, yada, yada, yada… it all spells out one general theme: you will fuck up this recipe.

This is the one time where I might actually suggest using a resource provided by the Food Network, their website, along with websites like Allrecipes and Epicurious provide a nice ‘launching’ point for people who aren’t really quite sure what they’re doing. In the case of Epicurious and Allrecipes, I’ve known at least a couple of Executive Chefs who’ve told me just to pull recipes off of those particular sites when they don’t have a ready-made recipe they want to use.

Add “authentic” to whatever you’re googling.

This is how I’ve found my favorite food related website. Chances are there’s someone out there who has spent a great deal of their free time cataloguing traditional family recipes from their own respective ‘home’ country or region. My favorite go-to websites for tips in cooking classic Italian, German, or really any Ethnic Cuisine are either someone’s own personal website or blog.

Some of my favorite examples include:

Binnur’s Turkish Cookbook

And

Tasty German Recipes


Now that I've told you that: umm... continue to rely on me for creative, fun, and easy recipes your kids will crave! or something like that. I don't know... but keep reading my blog.