Home Cooking Essentials: Websites

Epicurious
More than 10,000 recipes await you here, along with seasonal articles, tips, interviews with professional chefs, restaurant reviews, equipment reviews, discussion--you name it. My favorite feature is "12 Ways with...", a dozen recipes on a theme; it's part of the Bon Appetit section of the site, which also includes Gourmet magazine and Epicurious TV. A breathtaking amount of material.

SOAR Recipe Archive
One of the grand old sites of the Internet, SOAR has been collecting recipes since before the web was born. There is a lot of dross here; some of the recipes are barely useable, and none of them have been taste-tested, edited or even looked at necesssarily. But the sheer numbers of them and the wide variety make this site a must-see. Often I have found recipes here that I have been able to track down no other way.

Foodgeeks
The coolest thing about this site (a fellow member of the totalwoman.com network) is its "tell us what you have to cook with, we'll give you a recipe" feature. Enter "broccoli, lentils, sausage" and it'll spit out likely recipes. I LOVE it. More than 5,000 recipes, with lots of features and other fun stuff. Recommended.

AllRecipes.com
This is the home site for some of my favorite recipe sites: CookieRecipe.com, PieRecipe.com, SoupRecipe.com and so on. A fun aspect of this site is that you can create your own recipe box and keep favorites on file. The recipes are mostly contributed by readers and are geared toward the everyday rather than the fancy-schmancy.

Honorable Mention
Meals for You
What sets this site apart is that you can get an entire set of meal plans including shopping lists all ready to go. You may be familiar with their touchscreen kiosks at your local supermarket. If you are seriously meal-impaired, this may be the way to go for a bit.