Last Saturday Miss Rhead spoiled Gavin and I with her astounding vegetarian cooking: Garden burgers topped with sauteed mushrooms and pepper jack cheese. I have to admit that I now actually like garden burgers MORE than I like meat burgers! Her cooking inspired me to want to learn how to be a better cook myself. As any nerd would, I looked for some recipe RSS feeds. Of course there is the site “simply recipes,” but it appears to only update every other day. I found some other sites, but alas, no RSS feeds (which my primary source of information consumption).

During my search I stumbled upon the site allrecipes.com. Not only do they have RSS feeds for various categories on their site, but you can sign up for an account and create a “recipe box” (Cookbook to the rest of us). Now when I’m checking out their RSS feed, I can add appetizing recipes to my recipe box. I don’t know about you, but when I’m making dinner with friends, the hardest part is finding something to make. The recipe box feature will allow us to browse a pre-chosen list of recipes so that we can skip that annoying step and go straight to the cookin’.

Another notable feature is the shopping list. Let’s say you’re planning a dinner with multiple courses. You still need to go shopping, so you look at the ingredients for each course and determine what you need to buy. The shopping list feature will add the required ingredients to your shopping list and it will sort them by type, which is how stores usually sort their aisles. This is handy for people like me who are easily lost in the grocery store. If you add multiple of the same item (the same item, but from different recipes), it will add them together so you know the total amount of a product you need to buy. Very cool!

Already I have made two meals I found from the site: Gourmet Chicken Sandwich and Pizza Without the Red Sauce; both of which were delicious. Go check it out; if not for the skill of learning to cook, then for the sake of the title of this post.

UPDATE: I just found a really neat feature where you can find recipes given ingredients you want to include/exclude.  This is great if you have extra ingredients from previous meals that you want to get rid of.  The more I use this, the more features I find.