Culinary Relief

A few months ago, a website called What The &%$! Should I Make For Dinner? became a viral hit. While the novelty of it was admittedly mildly amusing, the random recipe suggestions were less than appetizing. Fortunately, there are a number of other new online resources to come to the rescue when faced with the dilemma of culinary indecision.

Yummly: Though consumers have grown accustomed to intelligent services that can deliver entertainment suggestions based on past preferences and search histories (think Pandora, iTunes Genius, Netflix), there has yet to be a culinary equivalent that’s found mainstream popularity. Yummly could just be that service. Like with other recipe sites, users can customize searches based on ingredients, diet restrictions, allergies, price, cooking time, and cuisine. But what sets Yummly apart is its ability to intuit users’ taste based on prior searches. Similar to how Netflix’s recommendations become more accurate the more a user rates films, Yummly gains a better understanding of each user’s food preferences the more they employ it to search. Sure, one could enter ingredients into Google to try to find a recipe, but Google isn’t going to know about that peanut allergy.

FoodPair: Food Network or Epicurious? Martha Stewart or Real Simple? Sometimes the decision of what source to use to search for a recipe can be more daunting than the ensuing kitchen chemistry. FoodPair is a “metasearch engine” that was created to remove those steps from the cooking equation. Since, more often than not, homecookin’ is comprised of whatever random ingredients are inhabiting the larder – unless you’re one of those fortunate people who actually has the foresight to know that they’ll want seared scallops with lentils in a balsamic reduction two days after making a grocery run – the site is structured so that burgeoning chefs can simply enter in whatever ingredients they have instead of digging for a specific recipe. FoodPair then conducts a comprehensive search across a vast selection of cooking sites, like those mentioned, as well as others like Cookstr and Whole Foods’ recipe repository. Of course, if your fridge looks like this, you might be in trouble.

NonaBrooklyn: So, you’ve got the recipe, but what if you’d prefer to source the ingredients from neighborhood vendors in lieu of wheeling a cart up and down the frosty, fluorescent lit aisles of the supermarket? Thanks to the boom in locavorism, what was once an underground artisanal food movement has now become a mainstay. Giving those who like to keep their kitchen stocked with whatever goods are produced within, say, five miles rather than within 100, NonaBrooklyn is one of the first online hubs for locavore foodies within a specific community. Members can create profiles to network with likeminded eaters, as well as receive up-to-date news directly from local chefs, restaurants, specialty shops, and other food luminaries. While a lot of oversharing jokes are made at the expense of those who can’t make a dish out of backyard produce without telling all of Facebook about it, this is one social network where photos of homegrown heirloom tomato tarts will not only be welcomed, but also relished.