My girlfriend frequently watches Rachel Ray’s cooking show on the Food Network (the picture is of Rachel Ray, not my girlfriend). She enjoys the show mostly because of the great meals that Rachel prepares in just 30 minutes. Today she told me that she wanted to buy a Rachel Ray book so she can use some of the recipes at home. Instead, I decided to try to prove to her that she could find the same great recipes online. Google was my first stop, and I was presented with so many sites that had so many different recipe choices that I didn’t know where to start. To better refine my search, and find out what others were saying, I went to BuzzShout. On BuzzShout, my recipe search led me to two sites that I thought looked promising– MyRecipe.org and RecipeThing. 

First, you won’t get very far with RecipeThing, unless you create a username and password, but it is definitely worth it to do so. With RecipeThing you can search through other’s recipes by using the tag cloud or by selecting one of the featured recipes on the front page of the site. After creating an account, you’ll have your own recipe box where you can add your own recipes by writing them in, or copy others recipes from the “community potluck”. After copying someone’s recipe into your own box, you can then edit the recipe and take out or add ingredients or change preparation instructions to your liking. With your free account, you’ll also have a pantry that’ll help you keep track of the ingredients you have in the real-world. This is useful when seeing what ingredients you’ll need for different recipes that you collect on the site. With the “what’s for dinner” feature you can drag and drop recipes into days of the week and then get a shopping list based on what you have in your RecipeThing pantry and what you’ll need based on your chosen recipes for that week.

MyRecipe.org has a better looking UI than RecipeThing, and just looking at the pictures on the front page makes my stomach growl. MyRecipe.org also has tags, but unlike RecipeThing, you can also check out other user’s profiles and see what recipes they like or have submitted. On the negative side, I find two things very annoying about MyRecipe.org. First, when I forgot my screenname and password, I had no way to recover it. That was especially strange since they asked for my email both times I registered. Secondly, while I can email recipes to myself or others, I can’t copy them to “My List”, which is the part of the site where I’m able to aggregate recipes I like. I instead need to write all the recipes out myself.  

So, I will recommend two things to my girlfriend. One, that she uses RecipeThing instead of MyRecipe.org, and two, that when she cooks she wear the same outfit as Rachel Ray is wearing above.  

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Categories - recipething, Recipes |