Whenever I go through a good food website I somehow remember the song from the movie Ice Age 2 “Food, Glorious Food”. With all the yummy looking food pictures and fast to make recipes all I can think of is eating something. Going through a food website always awakens the sleeping chef inside me. Same thing happened when I was going through the New York Times Cooking website. The NYT cooking website was no doubt awesome, because I started to feel like everything is so easy to make. Not all websites can give you that feeling.
When you first go to the NYT cooking page, you will see some cool pictures of different dishes. You can easily find recipes based on cuisines, diets, meal types, preparation method, etc. The website features a recipe of the day at the top of the page, followed by the editors’ collection of recipes. Under editors collection there were some great recipes in the Summer pasta section.
You are required to register or sign in to the website in case you want to save a recipe or add notes. Signing in also has another advantage, called the recipe box. At the top left hand corner of the page you will see a tab named “Recipe Box“. Now what this tab does is, it asks you what kind of recipes you like. The website will show you a few recipes to select from. You just have to click the check mark if you find the dish interesting or the cross button if it is something that doesn’t interest you.
You can save the recipes for the dishes that you liked. As soon as you save the recipe, it is added to you saved recipes, which can be seen on the left hand side window.
You can also create a collection of your favorite recipes for easy browsing. For example, you can start a collection named quick, which can have all your favorite recipes which can be cooked in under 10 minutes. This will make it much easier to find a recipe.
Also, in case you are confused about what to cook, then you can go to the recipe tab at the top of the page. When you get to this page, you will get a lot of options to decide which kind of recipe you feel like cooking. You can either enter a search keyword to find recipes or you can choose from the many drop down filters below the search box to choose the kind of recipe you want.
The drop down boxes include filter for diets like vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, healthy, low calorie, etc. You can also filter recipes based on cuisines like Mexican, Indian, Chinese, American, etc. The screenshot below shows all the cuisines under this section.
You can also find recipes based on meal type or preparation method. Under the more drop down box you can choose recipes which have video tutorial included with them.
A recipe you like can also be shared via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, email or you can also take a print out of the recipe. All the recipes list out the ingredients required and the preparation method. You can give a star rating to a recipe depending upon how good it was. In case you made some changes, or something important you want to remember the next time you cook this dish, then you can leave notes at the bottom of the recipe. These can be seen by you or others to help out while cooking this dish.
You can click the check mark you see on each recipe, which means you have already cooked this particular recipe. So next time you are looking for something new to cook you can skip the check marked recipes. Under the grilling / BBQ section you will find some mouth watering preparations. Go through them and save your favorites to your collection.
There is also a iPhone and iPad app available for NYT Cooking. If you prefer browsing through your iPhone or iPad then here is the link to this NYT cooking app.
There are some nice technique videos which tell you how to do a particular thing, like mincing garlic, which I have always found one difficult thing to do. Watching these technique videos, you can learn how to do things easily. Also, you can go through recipe boxes of the featured cooks on the website. Apart from that, you can browse through the latest recipe additions and go through popular searches as well.
Check out free cookbook software to manage your recipe collection.
I loved browsing through this website and found some great food ideas to try out. I saved them to my collection so I can find them later easily. Watched the technique video on mincing garlic, which I will definitely be trying tonight. I already feel like a chef going through this website and would recommend you to go through this website as well if you are a cooking enthusiast.
Check out The New York Time Cooking website.
