Don't Eat Out, Find a New Recipe

My wife and I have certain meals we each enjoy cooking. She excels at spaghetti, lasagna and chicken and noodles, among other dishes. I am not bad at soups, casseroles and grilling. There is some cross over; dishes we both like to make and put our own spin on.

We enjoy the time spent preparing and cooking meals together, as well as giving each other a day off by cooking a specialty. Dinning out is something we consider for special occasions, such as a birthday, anniversary or the last kid moving out of the house. We might even throw in anniversaries of the last kid leaving. If you have survived teenagers you know what I'm talking about!

Eventually everyone gets in the mood for something different; not too exotic, but a little off the beaten path. Maybe a new found recipe or that old one you never did try. Did you get the recipe for that dish you pigged out on at the last office or church potluck? Would you like to try to prepare your favorite restaurant dish at home? To that end I dug through the food & recipes folder in my browser and put together the following list of sites.

All Restaurant Recipes – “A Collection of your Restaurant Recipes!”

All Recipes – One feature I like on this site is a section that allows you to enter the ingredients you have on hand, or don’t want to include, and search for a recipe.

Cooks.com – This well laid out site makes it easy to find what you are looking for.

Copy Kat – They feature a pretty extensive collection of both restaurant and personal recipes.

101 Crockpot Recipes – We use our slow cooker all year long but it really gets a workout in the winter. Check out Chet’s list.

Eat The Seasons – I like this site because it tells you what foods are currently in season and includes nutritional information, tips and recipes for them.

Epicurious – This is a HUGE site. My favorite sections are international cooking and seasonal cooking. There is a lot to look at so bookmark this one.

Food Timeline – How about some who, what, where, when, why and how about food. This is an amazing and exhaustive site on the history of food.

Recipe Goldmine – Appropriately titled, they have some interesting categories such as Camping, Celebrity and Cowboy recipes.

Recipe Source – You can browse this one by region or type of dish. Make sure you check out their Extraterrestrial & Bizarre section.

Recipe Hound – They claim to have almost 11,000 recipes. Whoa! There is also a section dedicated to chile peppers called The Chile Page.

A couple more copycat recipe sites are Recipe Secrets and Top Secret Recipes. I have not tried out either of these yet but they look like they take cloning seriously.

Many manufacturers’ websites have good recipes that use their products such as Campbell’s and Pillsbury.

Bon Appétit!