Cooking - My New Favorite Reference Web Site!

Two years ago when I started cooking I was pretty bad at it to be honest - I really had no concepts around what exactly I was doing in the kitchen nor  how to make something taste good.  Slowly, this started to  change after I read Dr. Furhman's book Eat to Live and then again about six months six moths later by watching Julia Child on the Cooking Channel.

Unlike the very popular movie about her, Julia & Julia,  I really didn't have any breakthrough moments where I found myself drawn into the kitchen to try anything she was doing.  Honestly,  think I was just watching it more for the "shock factor" and was amazed/horrified to see her use all that butter, meat, salt and sugar in her recipes.

As luck would have it - the Cooking Channel stopped running her shows. After being slightly disappointed, I remembered seeing another show advertised during the commercials called  French Food at Home with Laura Calder and I instantly fell in love with her, her style and the show itself.  I highly recommend her show to anyone who wants to learn to cook country french fare (her cookbooks are great too!).  I DVR the shows so I can catch new episodes when they air and them watch them later. Granted, Laura uses a ton of butter and cream too, but the way the program is presented just make more sense to me.

More recently, I had an ever better break-through moment! 

Every Sunday, the New York Times  has a small food section in their Magazine that showcases amazing food and concepts from around the world. Liking routines in my hobbies, one Sunday I noticed there wasn't a food section for that week and I thought to myself - 'Grrrrr; I one thing I love about this paper is now not in there!'.... and that is where providence stepped in. 

• While looking up the previous week's recipe on the New York Times Web site, I found a treasure trove of information in their Heath and Dining & Wine sections; Since I do not take the paper daily... I had no idea all this information had been generated around cooking.

• On further investigation, one might also think that ALL the cooking information is in Dining & Wine section.... and it is... but the healthy stuff is in it's own section ....all the way at the bottom of the Dining and Wine section (see below)

Here is how to navigate to the two sections on the paper's web site:

• Dining and Wine:    http://www.nytimes.com/pages/dining/index.html
• Recipes for Health  http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/series/recipes_for_health/index.html?ref=health

While there...check out the great articles by Martha Ross Shulman too!

• http://consults.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/insert-credit-martha-rose-shul/

Look at where they stuck the "Healthy" stuff..... All the way at the bottom!!

What is also really nice is the the information/recipes can be sorted by either Ingredients or themes!

I hope you enjoy this resources as much as I have!