Cooking Light
www.cookinglight.com

Whether or not you’re a subscriber to Cooking Light, you can enjoy the magazine’s first-class Web site. Unlike many other recipe Web sites, Cooking Light looks beyond great recipes to issues that will interest anyone who enjoys a healthy lifestyle. The Healthy Life section boasts daily tips and articles on nutrition and fitness, as well as an Ask The Experts feature. Travelers should check out the Travel area in the Healthy Life section; it explores some of the healthiest cities in America. Cooking Light’s Menus & Planning section comes to the rescue when you’re having a hard time planning meals for the week.

CooksRecipes.com
www.cooksrecipes.com

This massive online recipe warehouse has an easy-to-browse layout and tons of recipes. You’ll find plenty of main dishes, of course, but the site also offers several unusual recipes, including instructions for making your own sauces and condiments. That’s right—if you’re tired of the store-bought stuff, you can dabble in the art of mustard-making. The Web site also features a large selection of cat and dog food recipes with fun names, such as Bulldog Banana Bites and Gotta Have Sole.

Epicurious.com
www.epicurious.com

Billing itself as the site “For people who love to eat,” Epicurious dishes out tons of recipes and food-related articles. Although we like the site’s large recipe selection, we can’t get enough of the Articles & Guides area, which includes interviews with book authors and taste tests of unusual recipes. This section also features restaurant guides, wine and beer recommendations, and tips on the latest cooking appliances and gadgets. You can access the Epicurious recipes free, but if you plan to share recipes with friends or bookmark recipes that you want to use again later, you’ll need to sign up for a free account.

Food Network.com
www.foodnetwork.com

There’s something addictive about “The Next Iron Chef” TV series. If you’ve missed any episodes, you’re in luck: The Food Network offers full episodes of the show on its Web site to anyone who has a broadband Internet connection. You’ll also find information and video clips for some of the network’s other shows, including “The Gourmet Next Door” and “2 Dudes Catering.” Interestingly enough, the Food Network’s Web site offers much more than show times. Check out its recipes and holiday treat ideas and poke around the brand-new online cooking supply store.

RestaurantRow.com
www.restaurantrow.com

If you reach for the phone book when it’s your turn to cook, RestaurantRow.com is for you. The online restaurant search engine, which bears the tagline, “If you can’t cook . . . click!” lets you search for restaurants in your area, no matter where you are. Each listing includes location and contact information, as well as a Get Directions tool. Some listings also let you make reservations, for which you’ll need to pay RestaurantRow.com $4.95 (you can also subscribe for $7.95 per month to make unlimited reservations). RestaurantRow.com partnered with AvantGo so on-the-go users can enjoy the service via their handheld devices.

What’s Cooking America
www.whatscookingamerica.net

Food buffs, rejoice. What's Cooking America offers a smorgasbord of treats for food lovers, including restaurant reviews, dish histories, dinner party menus, and a dictionary of culinary terms. And, of course, there are plenty of photos—including mouthwatering pictures of breads, hams, seafood, turkeys, and other dishes—both in the making and on the plate. The site boasts recipes for everything from such common items as cookies to the exotic Flaming Pineapple Boat With Shrimp. We like Peggy’s Baking Corner in particular: It features some inspiring baking ideas, including Ear Of Corn and Sunflower cupcakes. DIYers should check out the section’s instructions for making your own cookie cutters.

Compiled by Joshua Gulick
Illustrated by Andy Arkwright

That’s News To You Finding the appropriate online group to match your interests can be a monumental task. So each month, we scour the Internet to bring you the friendliest forums and most interesting bloggers the Web has to offer. This month, we make new friends in the kitchen. BakeSpace www.bakespace.com Although many recipe Web sites offer forums for sharing cooking tips and tricks, BakeSpace dedicates its entire site to helping users interact. “People have always gathered in the kitchen to cook, talk, and hang out,” says Babette Pepaj, founder of BakeSpace. "It's a grassroots online community where members can build their own ‘virtual kitchen' and share their passion for cooking and baking with other food enthusiasts from around the world.” As with other social networking sites, BakeSpace lets each member create a profile that visitors and members can view. Like MySpace (www.myspace.com), your profile’s main page features a list of your BakeSpace friends, complete with their pictures. You can customize your profile to include photo albums, personal information, and, of course, recipes, recipes, recipes. You can easily exchange recipes with BakeSpace friends and leave public comments about their recipes. BakeSpace also includes a large, multicategory forum that caters to every kind of cook. You’ll find discussions on cooking healthy meals, kitchen humor, and even comments about food that appear on television. Members regularly post pictures of their favorite dishes and offer both moral support and advice to beginner cooks. After all, as Pepaj points out, “BakeSpace encourages people to come for the food, but stay for the conversation.”

Share The Wares Some of the best apples in the online orchard are the free (or free to try) programs available for download. Each month, we feature highlights from our pickings. This month, we flip the digital pages of a cookbook program. The Living Cookbook lets you add new recipes and then share them with friends and family online. If you have a photo of a dish, you can add it to the Cookbook’s recipe entry. Living Cookbook www.livingcookbook.com We don’t blame you for having an emotional attachment to that dog-eared cookbook your parents gave you years ago. It holds as many memories as it does recipes, and it will make a great gift for your child or grandchild someday. You’re not likely to develop that sort of bond with recipe software any time soon. That’s not to say that there’s no place in your kitchen for cookbook programs, of course. A good program offers some important features that a traditional cookbook simply can’t, such as the ability to automatically add nutritional information for dishes or let you share recipes over the Internet. One of our favorite recipe programs is Living Cookbook, which has a simple, easy-to-use interface. Living Cookbook lets you organize your recipes by several categories, including the type of dish. That’s helpful if you want to be able to look up all pasta or salad recipes. The software also lets you create more than one cookbook, so you can, for example, create a cookbook dedicated to healthy dishes or seasonal dishes. The software includes plenty of its own recipes, but you can add new recipes via the New Recipe wizard, which lets you enter the information manually or copy and paste it from other digital sources, such as Web sites. Download Living Cookbook and try it on your computer free. Once you’ve tried the software 25 times, you’ll need to buy the $29.95 user license to continue using it. Living Cookbook supports Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP.