apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

So shamless plugging here, but I use food blogs. I know and trust the people behind them and usually work out for me.

My faves are:
Simply Recipes - http://www.elise.com/recipes/
101 Cookbooks - http://www.101cookbooks.com/
Dessert First - http://dessertfirst.typepad.com

-Garrett of Vanilla Garlic
http://vanillagarlic.blogspot.com/

I use tons of blogs. I love that I can find international and unique ideas easily. I also use allrecipe.com and of course thekitcn.com. I favorite place everyone I come across so I can see what else is out there. My world is small but online I learn more then I ever imagined possible.

there is also mine :) www.organicandnaturalmom.blogspot.com

I mostly use magazines or the online versions of magazines( ie epicurious is bon appetit and gourmet and something else) The blog recipes that I use are usually referenced or slightly altered versions of magazines or cookbooks. Most of the truly original recipes I've tried from blogs have been disappointing, usually bland. The way I see it you're better off cooking a recipe from someone who actually gets paid to cook.

Most of my new recipes come from this website, or slinks from posted on it (nytimes, other blogs, etc). Another bunch come from tv shows, via their websites, and a few trickle in from magazines. I almost can't imagine cooking in a time before the internet!

I use food blogs and cook books. Orangette is my all time favorite food blog (Sorry Kitchn, I hope you'll forive me) and her recipes are great because they're recipes used by a busy person who loves to cook so they're usually fairly simple and always delicious.

My friends often give me cook books for birthdays and Christmas (possibly because they know they'll get the benifit of my recipe testing). When I get a new one I'll sit down with a tablet of sticky notes and read the thing, cover to cover. Possibly more than once. The stickies go on pages that look interesting and I try them as I have time and guinea pigs. What? You don't think I'm going to eat an entire cake alone, do you?

Oh, one more thing I use is the newspaper. I read both the SF Chronicle and the NY Times and love their food sections. I'm especially fond of Mark Bitman's Minimalist column in the NYT and the Accidental Vegetarian column in the SFC.

The internets are my recipe book. But I don't usually follow them. I browse a few similar recipes and then make what I think sounds good. It may or may not lean towards one of the recipes. I do also keep some standard books for general reference (Joy of Cooking, More With Less), but do not subscribe to magazines. More and more I just throw something together, cooking by feel, which I guess comes from experience with recipes.

I use Epicurious and All Recipes primarily. And I read lots and lots (about 20?) food blogs each day. I think my favorite blog has to be Smitten Kitchen...such beautiful pictures and everything I've made from it has been plate-licking good.

Cookbook recipes usually turn out better than the ones I find on the internet. Maybe they've been tested more thoroughly?

I take a lot of basic techniques from Tigers and Strawberries. Her default style is much more influenced by India and China than mine is, which helps broaden my horizons (well that and the native Appalachian cuisine, which is just as foreign to me as the Indian). She's also trained in the classical French tradition, which is a lot more familiar to me... my family never really did White American food, we defaulted more to vaguely French.

Many of her recipes focus on a specific technique or ingredient, so that you can learn to use it in improvisational cooking. Very helpful! I prefer to use her technique for browned onions over most standard cookbook descriptions... and they're handy in all kinds of meals.

My other favorite blogger is Maki of Just Hungry and Just Bento. She is Japanese, and patiently goes through how to do a wide variety of traditional Japanese foods. Everything I've tried works, even tho Japanese food is very unfamiliar to me.

i cook from a variety of sources. i usually begin with my cookbooks (cooks' illustrated, everyday food, etc) then go to epicurious if i can't find what i want in my books. if i still can't find what i'm looking for then i just google it wait to see what comes up! i recently made some bananas foster ice cream with a google-searched recipe and it turned out beautifully!
i read thekitchn daily. i also love orangette and married with dinner but have never actually tried any of their recipes... yet!

http://threadtrace.wordpress.com

The majority of my new recipes come from Mark Bittman for the Minimalist. He's the best I've found when it comes to getting the most deliciousness out of the least trouble.

I also go to allrecipes or epicurious if there's a certain ingredient I want to use up.

http://www.recipezaar.com/

User-submitted recipe site with ratings and comments from other cooks. One of the best features is being able to search on an ingredient, cuisine, or course and then filter out other ingredients or filter by categories to focus your search results. It calculates nutritional info for all the recipes, too.

I'm a vegetarian and I love this site b/c I can filter by that and get only veg-friendly recipes for a given ingredient (a life saver with my CSA subscription -- sure, you might have ONE Napa cabbage recipe up your sleeve, but three weeks in a row?).

It's also neat because you can combine two items that you want in a recipe and exclude a third, like if you don't like goat cheese but you want to make something with rapini and grape tomatoes.

The community is really great and the reviews are super helpful, though you do get a lot of "I LOVED this recipe, I just subbed this for that, that for this, left out this and that, added several spices b/c I like it hot/not too hot, and threw in some other stuff I had sitting around. Great recipe!" kind of comments -- a risk you run with cooking aficionados, I guess). There are even some famous (or infamous -- Mean Chef, I'm looking at you) posters that get name-checked in reviews all the time. Add to that the community forums, cuisine challenges, and Zaar World Tour online events and it's a great resource.

This is the kind of site you visit with one goal in mind and end up surfing and bookmarking for hours.

I love:

Simply Recipes: http://www.elise.com/recipes/
Bake Or Break: http://www.bakeorbreak.com/
Smitten Kitchen: http://smittenkitchen.com/
Baking Bites: http://bakingbites.com/
Cooking Light: http://www.cookinglight.com/cooking/
Food Network: http://www.foodnetwork.com
Women's Health Magazine: http://www.womenshealthmag.com/nutrition (for great recipes, healthy eating, and smart food shopping)

I love this post! It's truly amazing how much the internet and food related blogs have dramatically effected the way many of us cook.

The more I cook, the more I rely on all forms of food writing for inspiration, guidance and step by step recipes.

I'm a big fan your site, Tastespotting, Serious Eats and Orangette for my internet inspiration and turn to the culinary masters for a little more hand holding. I'm currently checking out stacks of great cookbooks from the library to save some money:http://foodwoolf.blogspot.com/2008/07/save-your-pennies-for-dinner-go-to.html

The one thing I truly love about the internet is how much influence all my food related reading has on what new ideas and ingredients inspire me and make me want to create recipes of my own.

Thanks for the inspiration!

Torrilin, thanks for the rec. on Tigers and Strawberries. Anyone who publicly expresses hatred for the CI Empire is a friend of mine!

I love the google food blog search, http://foodblogsearch.com/ , and use it almost exclusively anymore. All my favorite blogs are included, plus some that I would never find otherwise. If I'm interested in something I've never done before (most recently plum galette), chances are a food blogger has done it and written about it.
I hate allrecipes.com, maybe because most of the recipes I find on there are of the canned-cream-of-soup variety.

I subscribe to Fine Cooking and have been inspired by many of the recipes in it.

I use cooking blogs, cooking websites, recipe websites, friends, cooking shows, talk shows, magazines, and websites like this. I also have a couple of friends with whom I share recipes.

I mainly use the Internet to quickly compare recipes. Yesterday I made succotash for the first time, but I found I didn't have one ingredient called for in my cookbook. I was wondering what else might be a nice substitute, so I did a quick Google search and compared 3 or 4 recipes. There was a common base but a pretty wide range of "finishes." Only one of my cookbooks has a succotash recipe (I checked). Without the Internet, I would have made a substitution that made sense to me, but probably not the one I ultimately tried (and really liked!).

I do quite a lot of baking, and other than a few tried and true family recipes, I use a select few websites - mainly because of their "reviews" section. I feel much safer entering into a recipe if I see 87 people have all had similar, positive results!

I love Epicurious, it allowed me to let go of my collection of Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines. Love that you can save recipes to your "recipe box".

I get a lot of cookbooks from the library. Mostly ones I know I'll want to read through rather than cook from.

I tend to look on the internet mostly. As much as I like books, I love having searchable resources. Sure books have an index, but not a phrase search. The other advantage of the internet is that people are not afraid to go all out on their recipes, and not worry about making their recipe for the widest possible audience.

Thanks for the links, all of these are great!

I love Herbivoracious- vegetarian blog. Michael Natkin is sooo cute!!
http://herbivoracious.com/