Five Best Recipe Search Tools

Lifehacker: Five Best Recipe Search Tools

Here's a look at five of the best tools for finding great recipes online.

Food.com (Web-Based, Free)

Food.com, formerly Reciepzaar, is an all-things-food-related web site with an emphasis on recipes, cookbooks, and more. You can browse popular recipe categories, check out the most frequent searches, and, of course, search for recipes. Where Food.com really shines—massive recipe database aside—is its Recipe Sifter tool. You start by selecting what course you want, then what kind of sub-course (like appetizers in the form of dips), and then from there you can narrow your recipe search with ingredient filters, ease of preparation, occasion (holidays, dinner parties, etc.), dietary requirements, and more.

Bing Recipe Search (Web-Based, Free)

Since early 2010, Microsoft's search engine Bing has had enhanced recipe search features. Search for ingredients, recipe names, or other food-related search terms and you'll see the "Recipes" tab along the top navigation bar. Click on it and Bing filters your search results to show and organize just recipe results. From there you can search by ranking, cuisine type, convenience, season/occasion, main ingredients, and more. Bing pulls from a wide range of sources like Allrecipes, The FoodNetwork, Delish, MyRecipes, Epicurious, and other popular recipe sites.

Allrecipes (Web-Based, Free)

Allrecipes is a recipe sharing and cataloging web site with an enormous database of recipes. You can search the site without an account, but with an account you can store all the recipes you find (as well as ones you add) in your recipe box. The advanced search tool on Allrecipes is especially helpful for drilling down through their numerous recipes and allows you to easily specify very exact requests—say, for example, you want to see lunch-appropriate recipes that are diabetic-friendly, contain no pork or eggs, and are prepared in a Caribbean style. If you enjoy browsing recipes and scanning delicious food photographs as much as you enjoy cooking them up, Allrecipes has an extensive photo section where members show off their food-photographing skills.

Epicurious (Web-Based, Free)

Epicurious combines an extensive database of recipes with a host of features that make recipe search and the subsequent preparation simple. You can search for recipes based on ingredients, food style, or dietary needs, among other factors. For easy shopping you can print a shopping list for the recipe you find or fold multiple recipes for your meal planning into one master shopping list to buy everything in one sweep. Epicurious is available as an Android and iOS application, so your recipe searching and ingredient checklists can travel to the store with you.

SuperCook (Web-Based, Free)

If you find yourself frequently browsing recipe web sites but frustrated when you realize that every recipe that catches your eye requires a trip to the store for extra ingredients, SuperCook is the recipe site for you. To use SuperCook, you start plugging in ingredients you have in your fridge and pantry. The more ingredients you plug in, the more the list of potential recipes grows. All the while SuperCook actively suggests more ingredients you might have overlooked that would expand your recipe list. Put in tomato sauce, pasta, and basil, for example, and it asks if you might have butter, mozzarella cheese, olive oil, or other common ingredients in Italian dishes which would compliment the ingredients you already have.

Five Best Recipe Search Tools

Hipmunk – Better Flight Search Site

Are You Hip to Hipmunk? - NYTimes.com

Hipmunk is a flight-search site, a rival to Travelocity, Kayak, Expedia or Orbitz. But it’s far less cluttered. Its main screen has only 14 buttons and controls (From, To, Depart and various corporate links). Travelocity and Expedia each have more than 40 — not including ads, which don’t appear on Hipmunk.

So you type in JFK, SFO, 9/30 or whatever, and hit Search. Then, instead of an all-text table, the flights are laid out, color-coded by airline, as bars on a timeline of the day. You see exactly when they leave and land, and how many hours you’re traveling, based on the lengths of the bars.

You can sort by Price, Number of Stops, Departure or Arrival Time, Duration, or — my favorite — by Agony. (That stat factors in price, time in the air and number of stops.)

If you find a flight you like, you click it; Orbitz takes your order from there.

Are You Hip to Hipmunk? - NYTimes.com

Album Reminder

Album Reminder Keeps Track of Your Favorite Artists So You Don’t Have To

Free web service Album Reminder imports your favorite music artists from iTunes and Last.fm, and notifies you via email or RSS feed when they come out with new music.

No matter how much of a music junkie you are, it can be difficult to keep track of all your favorite bands and when they have new releases. Album Reminder puts all that information into one place, letting you import artists through iTunes and Last.fm, and notifying you when new albums come out.

By default, it will notify you via email, though you can turn off this setting in your account preferences and choose RSS instead. You can also manually add and remove artists for your list after importing, so you don’t accidentally get artists that you don’t want. The site itself is pretty minimal, but it’s a mighty convenient way to stay up on who’s releasing new music, and the addition of an RSS option (instead of annoying email spam) really makes the service more attractive. Hit the link to check it out.

Album Reminder [via #tips]

Album Reminder Keeps Track of Your Favorite Artists So You Don’t Have To

Top 10 Fitness Tips and Tools

Top 10 Fitness Tips and Tools

You can do a lot with your mind and a computer, but a healthy and honed body will get you even more out of life (if only more of it). Here are our favorite tips and tools for staying in shape.

Image by joshjanssen.

1. Stick with Push Ups for Overall Fitness

How can something as old-school as a push up—hands on the ground, knees off the floor, and push—still be in use, and even be growing in acceptance? Because it works out your whole body, it's better on your back than crunches, and you can use your raw push up count as a graduated curve toward fitness, as with the Hundred Push Ups program. Some things about getting in shape never get tired. (Original posts: One Hundred Push Ups, why)

To see the rest, click here: Top 10 Fitness Tips and Tools

Priority Inbox for Gmail

Email overload? Try Priority Inbox

Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer

People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.
Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we’ve evolved Gmail’s filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this “bologna” from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.
Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:

As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)
After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the “New! Priority Inbox” link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.

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Email overload? Try Priority Inbox - Official Gmail Blog