I admit I often use Google to search for recipes, but I get frustrated when their search results so often show the same old sites over and over. I already know about those sites! And I do use them…but I use Google when I feel like exploring a bit more. Enter Google recipe search. It’s a long URL. If the link doesn’t work or later you want to get there without coming back here, just enter “recipes” in the Google search bar and they’ll offer you the option of their recipe search right at the top.
Once there you can enter keywords, cuisine, main ingredient, course, prep time, meal type, plus limit by servings, calories, cholesterol and–my favorite!–set it to search only individual contributors rather than the top 10 recipes sites you already know about.
I also just learned that you can enter something like “ham bone -beans” in the regular Google search to find things with a ham bone but no beans. (Although really, if you have a ham bone, why would you NOT cook beans? Okay, maybe some greens with ham broth you’ve made from the bone. (And, by the way, you’ll still see recipes with lentils and split peas. I don’t think it’s smart enough to say -legumes.) Dang, now I want to cook a ham so I have the ham bone.
How do YOU find new recipes?
I have a library of recipe books that I absolutely love that I take recipes out of. Then I go to Google and use the regular search engine to find a few more recipes for basically the same thing (I find recipezaar.com a pretty good resource), then I take all the recipes, pare them down to their main, shared ingredients, take the remainder of the unshared ingredients that sound interesting add those to the main ones, and then most of the time add some of my own to make my OWN NEW RECIPE!
But most of the time I just make things up as I go along.
I use all of those mentioned above, but three I used the most is:
http://www.whfoods.org
http://www.marthastewart.com
http://www.cookinglight.com
Elise over at Simply Recipes (elise.com/recipes), which is an amazing food blog in itself, has a search function that searches all food blogs. It returns hundreds of results without the boring stuff from cooks.com or allrecipes. I’ve found some really great food blogs this way. -Erin
My favorite web site for recipes is allrecipes.com
I google. And get results like this:
http://pinkbunnyears.com/?p=222
Then refine the search and move forward, hopefully. I use this gal’s website a lot, even though she has a ridiculous about of recipes.
http://www.floras-hideout.com/recipes/index.html
And then I go to Food Network and pull out recipes from the chefs I really like, such as Emeril and Bobby Flay, although their search engine is cumbersome.
I find cooks.com a waste of time. They must have had 750 versions of the wrong Mrs. Fields cookie recipe.
Sometimes I browse through my gazillion cookbooks to find a recipe. The rest of the time? Google, of course. Thanks for the link–I’ve been meaning to check that feature out, but hadn’t done so until tonight. It is pretty handy, isn’t it?