Looking for some good food to get cookin’?

You can find recipes, restaurants, and food how-to sites online with just a click of the Google search button. However, the sites you see here below take it to another level and are worth visiting in your spare time.

One of the niftiest little tools I found was the Wheel of Food. You simply go to the site, enter your ZIP code and what you’re looking for (for example, “salad” or “brunch”) and hit the “proceed” button. The wheel spins out a list of local area places you can go. Move a location to the middle-right of the wheel (where it reads easily left-to-right) and the location appears in the top left of the page. (If there is no phone number, simply Google the place by its name and address and you should be all set)

Cooking by Numbers takes what you already have at home and gives you recipes for dishes you can make. Interesting concept! I’ll try it myself and update this post with my thoughts.

Complete Recipes is a great site if you are cooking by theme. For example, click on “cakes” and you get different kinds of cakes. Or you can choose Chinese, Italian, Mexican, or a host of other cultural categories and get loads of good, simple recipes. There’s even a diabetic category. You can also search Cooks.com for recipes; I’ve found a bit of everything there.

Do you engineer your cooking as if you were painstakingly crafting a work of art? Well, you need to check out Cooking for Engineers. This site tells you everything step by meticulous step, with pictures included, so that you get it juuuust right. It was also nominated for a blogger’s choice award (best food blog), so it’s worth taking a look at.

Foodieview allows you to search for recipes by ingredient, or by dish name. You can even search by chef (what was that delicious stew Emeril was talking about the other night?). Also, a rather new feature if you live in a growing number of U.S. cities: search for restaurants by cuisine type in your area.

Got a chocolate lover to please? Try the Gourmet Chocolate of the Month site for everything chocolate (chocolate lasagna, anyone? I’m not kidding…)

Snapshot of Tastespotting photo blog.

Want some exotic ideas? Take a look at Tastespotting, a photo blog that features cuisine from different sites. Photos of delicious dishes like the two shown here pop out at you. When you click on the photo, you go to the site with the recipe. Mind you, some of these sites have quite an amazing selection of dishes to show off to you! I think Tastespotting is a great site for anyone with a passion for cooking different dishes and trying new recipes, and I appreciate the way it links you to different sites. Truly a must-see.

How about sushi? Does that sound appetizing? SushiLinks.com won’t disappoint.

If it’s specific herbs and spices you are looking for, then I have a site for you where you can find out just about anything about herbs and spices.

Don’t know the name of the food? Or do you know the name but not what it looks like, how it tastes, what you use it for, etc. Either way, the Cook’s Thesaurus will probably help you.

What about healthy, sustainable eating? Well, there’s always Sustainable Table. Vegetarian? VegCooking.com is for you. For people who don’t eat meat and animal products, there’s also Fat Free Vegan.

Finally, if you eat to live, you might want to know about the 29 healthiest foods out there. Or if you need to go to bed but you don’t want to go hungry, these foods [in small quantities] can actually help you to fall asleep.

Please, add comments if you thing there is anything here that got left out!

June 5th, 2007 Posted by Michaell at 01:20pm | Food | one comment