What’s Your Favorite Recipe Website?

As amazing and vast as the Internet is, I just can’t seem to find *the perfect* cooking website. It’s so different with cookbooks– do you have a favorite cookbook from which you cook ALL the time? I do, I have several. But it’s not so with recipe websites. Maybe because they are usually built around all sorts of contributors who have all sorts of different tastes and ideas. Oddly enough, I like plain food. PLAIN food. No gourmet sauces that take all day to make, no weird ingredients where I have to take a vacation to Paris to find certain foods, no crazy techniques that require a houseful of servants to help. Just plain food.

Is there ANY website out there that offers simple, basic, plain recipes?! For crying out loud! I can’t find one. Maybe every cook out there is trying to outdo every other cook out there. Not me. I just want to slap wholesome, tasty food on the table and get on with life, you know? So many cooking websites think that my life REVOLVES around food. Um, no, it doesn’t. I want to eat because I’m hungry not because I have this sensual, biological urge to indulge my senses in rapturous undulations of culinary ecstasy.

So.

Anyone have any suggestions?

If not, I’m going back to my watermarked, dog-eared, batter-stained Betty Crocker cookbook. I’m rather tired of the same old same old, but sorry, I just can’t muster the energy to whip up the latest, greatest tofu-tainted, kiwi-encapsulated, pine-nutty, asafetida-extracted delicacy for my ravenous teens.

Apple Season Commences!

I don’t know, it seems kind of early for apple season. Or maybe September has just kind of caught up to me very quickly…. at any rate, all my local news outlets are reporting that Upstate New York has a bumper crop of apples this year!

What’s really amazing is that the apples survived the crazy weather we’ve had this year. A soaking spring, super hot and super dry summer, tornadoes, TWO hurricanes, and now a blight. :-p Gotta love New York apples! They’re hardy little things!

By the way, if you are like me and can’t remember if Spys are for pies or for fries, or what’s a best eating apple versus the baking apples, see this website: Pick Your Own. They have a huge list of all the apple varieties, when they are in season, what you can use them for, and more. They also have some yummy recipes, places to find PYO apple farms, and loads more information on their site. The varieties list is long, though, beware. Better print it out or load it on your pc tablet for easy access…. I had no idea there were so many apple varieties!

Online Cooking Resources

Boy, I’m glad I decided to sift through my 1,300 emails tonight. They’ve been sitting there since December! They are my “tech” email subscriptions, and I usually browse through them, well, like every three or four months! But I found some really great videos, tips, software programs, and 4-month old news. :-p

Anyway, buried deep with the emails alongside notices about trimedisyn and ANOTHER Apple product release were some links to nifty and free cooking applications!

Cooklet is an online recipe book. I am not completely ready to give up my books, but I do search for recipes online a LOT. My cookbooks are very old, dating back to the 60s, and some of the recipes are fatty and full of carbohydrates. Online recipes are usually more veggie-like. Anyway, Cooklet looks cute. You might like it.

NoTakeOut looks even better. It even has an iPhone app. It’s a meal planning site, but what’s great about it is that it includes side dishes and not just the main course. The recipes there look very good, and the photos are appealing. Click “today’s menu” for the course for today. I like this one!

My friend Carole mentioned a new site she found called E-Mealz. Read about what she thinks of the program so far. I like it enough, except for two things: their meal plans do not accommodate families larger than 4 (or at least, that’s all I could find. If you know different, please tell me!!). And some of the ingredients for things are expensive. Some are gourmet-ish, others are packaged foods. Because I feed a family of 6 adults, we avoid pricey pre-packaged foods and fancy ingredients. So I don’t know that it would be worth my while to get it.

If you know of any other good recipe or meal sites, please let me know. I’m currently expanding my horizons!

CrockPot App Recipe Review

I mentioned earlier that I downloaded a new app for the iPhone, the Crock-Pot Slow Cooker Recipe Finder app. I’ve been toodling around with it a lot. I’ve built a list of favorite recipes from it. The best thing I like about the app is the ability to save a recipe, and the app with include all the ingredients into a shopping list. It’s make meal planning SO SO easy. I think it’s the best thing about the app. I’m looking for more apps that do similar things. I’ll let you know when I find them) and if you know of any, please let me know!).

Well, I tried the Beef Stroganoff recipe last night. It was “OK.” I’m not a big fan of cream sauces, but the kids like stroganoff. Stroganoff is, I believe, a Russian dish. I find it bland…. I wonder if the Russians really made it as bland, it’s like eating the leather from ugg boots, to me. It always needs more salt and LOTS more spices.

The recipe is a basic Beef Stroganoff (you use beef strips and not ground beef). It has onions, mushrooms, beef broth, Worcestershir sauce, etc. The recipe called for white wine, but I had none so I skipped that. I also usually add some of my own ideas when cooking– I was tempted to add paprika to this recipe to give it some kick, but I decided not to. I wanted to see how this would taste if I made it straight by the recipe. Again, just “OK.”

The recipe also calls for sour cream (another bland ingredient, I think). I added it very carefully, but it still curdled from the heat a little. (I haven’t been able to stop sour cream from doing that for any of my crockpot recipes! I’m going to avoid sour cream altogether next time).

The kids liked it, enough to eat it all! The beef was nice, but a little strong (always is in crockpot). The gravy consistency was good, but bland. I would make this recipe again, but I would spice it up a bit.

I’ll have more from this app (and any future app) to come. I’m looking forward to making some of the chicken recipes, especially a lemon-herb chicken dish that looks great! Stay tuned…

Crock-Pot iPhone App

Oh, it’s winter– comfort food season! Unfortunately, I have been so busy with work that I have not been cooking very often. My poor kids have been forced to scrounge for meals these days. I just don’t have as much time as I used to, searching for recipes, tabulating the ingredients, writing a grocery list, cooking all day… yow, cooking a meal is very labor-intensive!

I found this really neat iPhone app, though, and I love it! It’s the Crock-Pot Slow Cooker Recipe Finder app (whew, THAT’S a mouthful). It’s a really neat little tool. Since I don’t have a whole lot of time to spend, creating menu plans and all, I use this app on the fly while I shop. You can quickly search the app by cuisine, ingredient, course, etc; choose a recipe and click “Add to Shopping List” (the little + at the top). So everything is added to my list.

What makes this app SO Perfect is that if you add two or more recipes to your Shopping List tab, the app will generate a list combining ingredients for all recipes you’ve selected. YAY! I love that feature!!! To see the combined shopping list, choose some recipes, then go to Shopping List, and click the “List” tab. There you will see a checklist of things you need to buy. It has little checkboxes, too, so you can cross off what you have purchased. YAY YAY! I love this.

I do think it needs more recipes, however. It has a lot already, true, but after I use them all up, I’d love to see more. I’ve only been using the app for a short time, so maybe the app people add more recipes after awhile, I don’t know.

Anyway, crockpots are MARVELOUS things. They make it SO easy to cook. The foods tend to be a little heavy, though, so you may wind up searching lipo 6 reviews after seeing some of the ingredients. But it’s a good app. Thumbs up!

I’ll have more reviews on food apps in future posts. Thanks for reading

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