Finding New Recipes

When I'm in search of a new recipe the first place I usually turn to is my dear friend, the internet. There are limitless recipe sites, food blogs, chef sites and instructional videos you can access with a single click….including the great site you are now www.wagrown.com. On the flip side, sometimes the enormity of resources can make it hard to know which information is trustworthy and tasty. Here are a few tricks I follow when I'm looking for a new recipe online.

• Be specific in your search. If you're looking for a salad to serve to serve alongside grilled salmon then search for "salad+grilled+salmon" not "salad". The first search option will yield specific, paired recipes that will likely meet your needs and the second could run anything from fruit salads to Jell-O salads to pasta salads.
• Read the reviews. Two sites that I use the most are www.epicurious.com and www.allrecipes.com because they have huge user communities full of people who are passionate about food and want to share their experience and opinion about the recipes they’ve prepared. I use their rating scales to determine whether a recipe is even worth attempting and then read the reviews to get useful tips.
• If a recipe calls for a cooking or preparation technique that I'm not familiar with, I'll do a video search for it. Youtube has countless videos of professional and amateur chefs performing all kinds of tasks in the kitchen, such as cutting corn off the cob. It's like attending a free cooking class.
• Follow food magazine sites and blogs to hear about new trends. I've learned about great things such as barbecuing pizza, cooking beans in a crockpot, and countless other things from quickly perusing through sites and magazines when it fancies me.

Aside from the internet, I also get a lot of great recipes from family. My siblings all like to cook or bake and we'll text each other pictures of drool worthy food we've made and share its recipe.

This gem was texted by my sister this week. It’s the banana, pecan, caramel cake she made for her son’s birthday.
 Another great source is a potluck. Potlucks give you an opportunity to taste a new recipe without making it yourself. If you love the dish, the person who brought it will undoubtedly share their recipe because they love it too.
These are just my ideas, but I’d love to hear what tips you have for finding fabulous new recipes. Do you have a favorite site, app or other avenue for discovering new tastes? If so, leave a comment and tell me about it. I’m always looking for something new to cook up!