Review of Pepperplate.Com

Attention foodies (or anyone who searches for recipes on the internet): Pepperplate.com will CHANGE YOUR LIFE. I know this is a pretty big claim to make, but keep reading. If you haven't heard of Pepperplate.com, get ready to have your mind blown.

I love to cook, read food magazines and blogs, and am constantly finding interesting recipes from a million different websites. I bookmark them, then forget about them, because there's no good way to organize recipes, or search among them once they're bookmarked. I was searching for a better solution when I came across Pepperplate.com, a new website/smartphone app that promises just that -- a way to organize your favorite recipes from all over.

It took me approximately five seconds to realize that Pepperplate.com is the answer. Once you create a (free) account on Pepperplate.com, you can import recipes from literally any website you like. Pepperplate.com allows for one-click importing from most of the major food sites (Epicurious, Food & Wine, Allrecipes.com and more) plus many well-known blogs -- meaning that Pepperplate.com does all the formatting for you, putting the ingredient list, instructions, notes, hyperlink and photos in the right places. For websites that don't work with Pepperplate.com's one-click importing, you can add the recipes manually, via a clever Pepperplate.com pop-up window that appears when you click import. You can also manually add your own recipes to Pepperplate.com!

Once your recipes are imported to Pepperplate.com, the real magic begins. You can add your own category labels to each recipe, allowing you to organize and search your recipes in a way that makes sense to you. You can edit recipes, add notes, create weekly menus, share your recipes with friends and put together a shopping list, all with a few clicks in Pepperplate.com.

Lest you think I'm shilling for Pepperplate.com, let me add a bit of criticism -- Pepperplate.com isn't perfect (yet). The category search function, while incredibly helpful, doesn't allow you to narrow down your recipe list by adding more categories to the search. So, if you search for "dessert" and "citrus" (these are just examples of two categories I created in my own Pepperplate.com account), you get both all of your dessert recipes AND all of your citrus recipes (which may not all be desserts), instead of just those recipes that contain BOTH the "dessert" and "citrus" tags. Also, adding recipes to the menu planner requires way too many clicks -- the process needs to be streamlined. These are minor complaints, though, and probably easily addressed by the Pepperplate.com staff.

In short, Pepperplate.com is a godsend for anyone who likes to search for recipes online. I look forward to any improvements the Pepperplate.com team comes up with, but even if they don't change a thing, Pepperplate.com is most definitely the best new website for foodies I've seen in a long time and the best way I know of to organize an online recipe collection. Check out Pepperplate.com now!