Great Recipe Site

Over the summer I’ve been trying to be more adventurous with my culinary skill. That is, I’ll be trying things slightly more complicated then preheating the oven, place on a baking sheet, and remove after 45 minutes.

I poked around a few recipe sites until I found one I really liked: AllRecipes.com.

They have a ton of recipes which isn’t hard to do; I know for a fact that you can purchase a cookie-cutter recipe site script with thousands of recipes for under $100, but lets stay away from the fact I’m such a nerd and get back to why I like the site.

Structure

The site is well thought-out. You can find recipes in a variety of forms with minimal effort including meal type, cuisine, occasion, and cooking specialty.

You can also use their advanced search to really narrow down your selection.

Essentially, anything you want to hunt down can be found within a few clicks from the homepage.

Custom Recipe Box

Once you finally find a recipe you like, you can add it to your own custom recipe box. You can then organize all the recipes into whatever categories you’d like. The next time you want to find it, there’s no searching involved. If you’re the crazy type of person that likes to print these things out they let you do it in a range of common recipe-box sizes including 3×5 and 4×6. Here’s a quick peek at the one I have set up so far.

Set Up Your Grocery List

This is my favourite feature. Once you’re done hunting down all the recipes you want to use for the next week or so, you can adjust the portion sizes to the number of people you’re cooking for (the recipe will adjust automatically) and then you can add everything you need to make it to your grocery list in one click.

As you add more to the grocery list, it will adjust rather then duplicating entries. For instance, if you send one recipe to your shopping list that calls for 1/2lb of chicken breasts and another that calls for another 1/2lb the list will simply add them together and combine them into one item. It also separates your list into the different isles at the grocery store (produce, bread, milk/dairy, cooking ingredients, etc).

If you need anything else that wasn’t in your recipe you can add that manually. You also have the option to save the list for future use if you’re the type of person that shops for the same things every time you go.

Other Features

I haven’t used many of the other features, but they also offer:

• Tips and Advice. You can browse from newest to oldest, alphabetically, or by category
• Community. The community section lets you create your cook’s profile if you wanted to. From there you can critique other recipes, upload your own, and communicate with other cooks on the site
• Contests. Pretty self-explanatory. Contests are held for prizes relating to food.
• Store. You can purchase cook books, kitchen appliances, specialty foods, etc

All in all its a great site with a large amount of custom recipes for all occasions and foods. If you’re having a hard time finding any category, use their sitemap to help you find what you need.