Things are gearing up early for the 2007 winter season at Travelers Rest, and now that Eddie and I have settled in after our trip down from New York, I am ready to resume writing my weekly column on technology for the TR Times. For the past two seasons I have written about topics that I thought readers of the paper would find interesting and useful. Often these topics concerned the Internet — both accessing it and using it. I thought I would begin this season’s columns with some suggestions on using the Internet in the kitchen.
For those of us who spend our winters living in an RV, room is at a premium. I enjoy cooking, and one of the things I miss during the winter is my library of cookbooks. I very rarely follow a recipe exactly as written, but I do like to use cookbooks for reference. Often, when I want to make a particular dish, I like to read the recipes by a variety of cookbook authors before deciding which recipe to follow. Enter the Internet and the plethora of web sites for and about culinary arts.
A Google search for gourmet cooking produces over four million hits; cookbooks produces over fifteen million hits; and recipes finds over 126 million hits. It is impossible for one person to visit all of these web sites, but I can recommend a few that I use as my online virtual cookbook library.
Two of my favorites are Teri’s Kitchen and the Food Network. The Food Network site is the companion web site to the cable television Food Network. A recipe search on the site will bring up recipes that were presented on the network programs by various chefs. Enter a recipe title and you will see pages of recipes that match your search criteria. Teri’s Kitchen site is run by Teri R. Foster. I don’t know her résumé, but I can vouch for her recipes — they are comprehensive, well written, easy to follow, and the ones I have tried have turn out very well.
A plus to both of these sites is that you don’t have to register before using them — something that is necessary for too many web sites these days. One well-regarded web site that you do have to register for is www.chefs.com. In addition to recipes, chefs.com offers registered visitors the opportunity to email or chat with a chef.
For general culinary reference, I use www.hintsandthings.co.uk/kitchen/measures.htm, which offers a conversion chart for weights and measures; homecooking.about.com/library/weekly/bloldconvert.htm, which offers unconventional kitchen conversions; and gourmetsleuth.com/equivalents_substitutions.asp for finding ingredient substitutions.
With these web sites, and of course a copy of the recently published TR cookbook, all the cooks in the park will be ready to tackle holiday entertaining. For direct links to the web sites mentioned in this column, and links to additional culinary web sites, visit the OnMouseClick companion blog at onmouseclick.blogspot.com. (For those of you who are not sure what a blog is, I cover the topic in next week’s column.)
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