Best Cooking Websites for Foodies

The Cook-At-Home Revolution has spawned a number of great websites for people who want to supplement their cooking skills, and here is a list of what I consider to be the best cooking websites for foodies. For anyone who is unfamiliar with this term, a foodie is, according to Wikipedia, anyone who is interested in the preparation of food for its own sake, as distinguished from a gourmet, who may or may not be a food professional (such as restaurateur or a chef). If you're planning a large dinner, or even if you just want to impress your fiancé, fiancée, husband or wife with your culinary chops, this is a great "go-to" list, although I'm sure there are many other great ones as well.

www.recipezaar.com

All of the recipes on this website are submitted by the website's users, called "Chefs." The other users then rate the recipes by a series of stars and their own inspired commentaries. Recipezaar claims to have an index of 425,000 recipes, which is more than you'll ever manage to bind into any cookbook. I have tried a number of them and there is an abundance of common-sense, tasty recipes to be found here. The comments from the reviewers are wonderful as well. And if you have some tasty recipes of your own to share with the world, this is the place to do it. This site lets you create your own recipe box (Recipezaar calls it a "cookbook"), in case you find a recipe you want to revisit later. The fact that the users create the content of this site - it's kind of a cooking "wiki" - make this one of the best cooking websites for foodies.

www.epicurious.com

This is the companion website to Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines, and it features primarily high-end culinary projects. This is also a great site for help with menu planning. If you have only basic or no cooking experience you might find this website a little frustrating, but after watching a few TV sessions with Rachael Ray you'll be up to speed! You can build your own recipe box here, and then later generate a cookbook from it. Reviewers also have an opportunity to rate the site's recipes (from one fork to four forks), and to submit their own recipes.

www.foodnetwork.com

Want to recreate Giada De Laurentiis's most recent mouth-watering meal? Fry chicken like Paula Deen? This website will help you do that, allowing you to lunge directly from your TV to your computer and snag that perfect recipe for your next party. Plus you will have had the added bonus of watching it prepared on TV! This made my list of the Best Cooking Websites for Foodies due to its strong appeal for people who learn visually. You can create your own recipe box from this website as well. This site also rates the recipes by cooking level, so if you're a novice you can pick a project that won't have you tearing your hair out, or calling your mom for help. Food Network also lets its reviewers rate the recipes.

I hope this stimulates your own adventures in the kitchen and encourages you to seek out other great cooking websites of your own. I am quickly becoming an Internet recipe junkie, although when time is at a premium (and my husband or son is on the computer), I have been known to leap to a cookbook for help. And turning pages made out of paper is often quicker than scrolling through recipes online. But in terms of the sheer number of recipes that are available, if you have a little time to do some searching, you can find some amazing food preparation ideas on the Internet.