Relishing Recipes for the Refined and the Reluctant

Apr 16th, 2008 | By Style Snob | Category: Sustainable Living

Rating 3.00 out of 5

It’s the perfect evening to surprise your boyfriend with a special home-cooked meal — but if you’re like me in the kitchen, you’re worried that an attempt at anything beyond an egg sandwich will turn out to be a dinner disaster! But really, sometimes the problem isn’t my ability to follow a recipe, sometimes it’s simply that the recipe is incomplete and I’m too un-epicurean to know it! brownies

I recall the first time I tried to bake a cake. Before I left work to pick up the proper ingredients at my local grocery store, I had googled and found thousands of vanilla cake recipes. I picked the one that had the shortest list of ingredients (because I was being cheap) and the simplest instructions. Consequently, the shortage of ingredients and the naive perception that all googled recipes would come out edible provided me with something that was as flatter than a pancake and disgustingly tasting.

Pitying my failed attempt, my boyfriend then googled a different recipe and went to the store to buy what my first recipe was missing — baking powder. How silly of me!

In any case, I’ve since gained a lot more appreciation for legitimate recipe books and professional recipe sites. Here are a few recipe websites that I’ve found to be great sources for both great chefs and tyro sandwich-makers like me. dish

Allrecipes.com - This website is great if you’re allergic to certain foods or if you just want to be more ingredient specific in your cooking. This feature is found on the site as the “ingredient search” under the “more searches” drop down. After you enter particular ingredients that you want to use, the site will then pull up recipes in its database that meet your criteria!

Foodnetwork.com - Here you’ll find a whole host of step-by-step videos that are great for beginner cooks (like me).

Epicurious.com - For the more seasoned cook, this website gives a great range of gourmet recipes in both print and video, plus it has an active forum and community of epicures.

Slashfood.com - A great recipe and food blog for those of you who aren’t looking for anything in particular, but just want to catch the latest on kitchen gadgets and food gizmos.

Recipezaar.com - This one is a little more risky, since all the recipes come from people who have joined the site. Because the recipes are posted by professional chefs the quality and the difficulty levels will vary — but the advantage is a wealth of old-fashion, family recipes on there!

*Photos courtesy of Winnie Lai

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