Food choices
I’m curious: How do you go about deciding what to eat for dinner?
Tommy and I have been cooking at home more and more. Sometimes there is no dinner plan until one of us comes home. Other times, I have planned out what to make for dinner every night of the week, and I even go to the grocery store on Saturday or Sunday to pick up the ingredients for at least the first few days of the week (when buying meat, I prefer to buy it the day of, or at most, one day prior to eating).
I used to use only foodtv.com and my Food & Wine magazines for recipe ideas. I don’t like the search feature of foodtv.com, but if you have an idea of what you want, it works pretty well. Tommy and I are always able to find tasty recipes (and some not so tasty) on the website. Lately I feel as if the site has failed us. I haven’t been able to find many recipes that I am interested in making. So last weekend I stumbled across Epicurious. I have known about epicurious for a very long time, but have never made an effort to really poke around the website. I like the site a lot. The three things that I like most about it are: 1. It has recipes that are available from Gourmet and Bon Apetit Magazines, providing a nice alternative to the Food & Wine recipes that I have available. 2. Users can post their own recipes… most of which seam reasonable and easy to sort through. 3. You can review or read reviews of all recipes that are posted. This is the one thing that foodtv.com does not have. I like browsing through the reviews of a recipe to see if there are other things I can add or things I should leave out of the recipe. Are there any other good places to go to look for recipe ideas?
February 7th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I very rarely plan ahead in the sense of figuring out what to make for a whole week. However, sometimes I feel like making a certain dish or trying something new, and I’ll plan around that when I grocery shop.
Epicurious, for the past few years, has been my go-to site for recipes. If that does work, I’ll hit up foodtv and then Google. I also leaf through my Joy of Cooking for ideas every so often, and I’ll go there first if I’m looking for a really basic recipe.
My method for recipes is usually to find base recipes for what I’m making and then work around that based on what I’m looking for and what I have in the kitchen. For example, when I was learning to make risotto, I read a bunch of recipes and settled on the basic proportions, and I made a plain risotto a couple times to figure it out. Now, I basically use that recipe and tweak it everytime i make the dish. When I want variations, I’ll just make changes to the recipe based on what’s in my kitchen, or I check Epicurious for ideas, but I usually just end up incorporating them into my own recipe instead of using the one on the site. I try to do that for most everything I cook because I’m more likely to get good results with recipes I know, and it just makes life easy for me.