Recipe Hunting

I don’t have a recipe to share with you all today, so I thought I would share how I find new recipes.

I’m sure you are all familiar with the feeling: you have a refrigerator full of ingredients but no idea how to put them together. It’s time to meal plan but none of your usual recipes sound appealing.  You want something different for dinner, but are out of fresh ideas.

Sound familiar?

It’s a problem we all run into frequently and it’s one of the reasons I love blogs so much.  I’m literally never without at least 10 recipes in my to-try pile.  But sometimes even that is not enough to spark my imagination or tempt my taste buds.

So where do I go to look for new recipes?  I have five places.

1. Tasty Kitchen – Tasty Kitchen (created by The Pioneer Woman) replaced All Recipes as my go-to site pretty much as soon as I discovered it.  I love that it’s real recipes from real home cooks and that the rating system seems fairly accurate.  I usually find exactly what I’m looking for with only a little searching.  And almost everything I’ve tried has been terrific.
2. Food Network – I am such a Food Network junkie; it’s actually how I got so interested in cooking and where I really learned to cook.  While there are only a handful of shows I’ll actually watch and cook from, it’s much easier to search their recipe archive that trying to track down the individual chef’s website and find the recipe.  And there is always a fun, serendipitous aspect of finding a recipe you weren’t expecting.  That’s how I found my pesto recipe.
3. Epicurious – This is where I go when I want something upscale.  Epicurious has their own recipes plus all the recipes from Bon Appétit and (now defunct) Gourmet magazines.  There’s a cool menu section where they give you suggested menus for holidays (and sometimes wine pairings) and they have lots of good articles on all aspects of cooking from buying the right equipment to eating out in cities around the world.  Not for the beginning cook, but a must for anyone who is looking for something a little more elegant than your usual pasta dish.
4. I’m an Organizing Junkie’s Recipe Index Round-Up – Laura created this as a menu planning resource and I have to say that while it does require some clicking and browsing, it’s really fun to look through all these bloggers’ recipe indexes.  There are some pretty big bloggers in there, some who have hundreds of recipes in their indexes, so I always find something interesting.
5. Pinterest – As Pinterest is my newest oppression, it only makes sense that I would use it to compliment my other obsession – food.  I just recently discovered that by searching for a specific topic, ingredient, or recipe, you could find hundreds of pins.  I searched “roast chicken” and got over 21,000 pins and almost 150 boards featuring a roast chicken recipe.  This may be my new favorite way to search for recipes!