'Epicurious' Cooking
We are all aware of the astounding amount of information (and misinformation) available on the web. Fortunately, there are also countless web sites and blogs filled with excellent recipes for people who love to cook. There is a site, or multiple sites, for any ethnic food group, special diet, famous chef, cooking show, or food-related magazine.
One site we have been using since its inception is Epicurious (www.epicurious.com) that contains recipes from past issues of Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines. The site boasts thousands of recipes. For example, by typing "tomato" into the recipe search box, you will turn up 2,361 possibilities. There is no charge to use the recipes from the Epicurious site; recipes of interest can be saved to a personal recipe box to be accessed by you at any time. Readers also are welcome to comment on recipes and these comments are available to visitors to the site. While a lot of the comments and suggested changes are interesting and useful, there are readers who will rate a recipe even though they made enough changes to create a completely different recipe from the one placed on-line.
We also enjoy the Williams-Sonoma web site, and we have found their recipes to be quite good (www.williams-sonoma.com). Eating Well (www.eatingwell.com) is a good source for healthy recipes. Both Food and Wine (www.foodandwine.com) and Cooking Light (www.cookinglight.com) offer numerous recipes from their magazines, but registration using either a subscription number from your copy of the publication, or from a copy purchased elsewhere is required. America's Test Kitchen (www.americastestkitchen.com) is also very interesting since their approach includes extensive testing for each recipe they print (there is a charge to access this web site).
Most of the sites have a printer-friendly option that allows printing of recipes without advertisements and offer the ability to e-mail recipes to yourself, or to a friend. We've included a couple of examples from two of these web sites in today's column.
