It’s not the answer you’re probably looking for but, my cookbooks. I happen to have a bunch of old cookbooks I’ve inherited from family members and friends. It takes some research skills sometimes, but it works.

I also maintain a personal blog site which is my online cookbook. It’s not only my own recipes, but also a link dump. When I find a good, non-AI article I’ll share it there like a clipping with the usual tags for how I catalog things. It takes a bit of discipline, but for me its second nature by now. It also lets me take notes on how a recipe worked out, and what substitutions or adjustments I’d like to make next pass.

It is definitely getting harder. I’ve been hitting YouTube looking for actual people.
Pasta Grammar
Tasting History
De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina
Pasta Grannies
Hatice Oncel

Some guy named Alton Brown recently started posting videos. He only had two up so far but he shows promise.

I don’t tend to cook what they are but I do get inspired between them and what I have on hand.

When I know exactly what in looking for I search and look at a few recipes and see if they pass the sniff test or not based on the photos and ingredients. Like are they mixing in a different bowl in two different pictures? Dl

Some guy named Alton Brown recently started posting videos. He only had two up so far but he shows promise.

/s, or are you one of today’s lucky 10,000?

Deb Perelman’s blog is incredible. She’s a delight, and any recipe I’ve tried has been a hit.

if you’re looking for baking stuff, King Arthur Flour has a lot of good and reliable recipes (and if you have problems, a help line, heh.)

But generally, I find them on the internet or wherever. I’m not a fan of allrecipes or other recipe aggregates. I generally don’t trust YT recipes unless they’re someone whose got some chops, so to speak. (rando content creator recipes make me cry harder than onions.)

I’ll also pass on any recipe touted as “easy” or similar. Not because I don’t like easy, but because a lot of times they take dubious shortcuts or add things that don’t really belong. For example, you really should use a ham hock for your pea soup. (or at the very least, pork/bone broth,) yes, it takes time. yes, it maybe more complicated. But it’s not nearly as good otherwise… and it’s not that difficult, really.

Never had loveandlemons.com let us down.

I do a websearch in this format:

simple <dish name> recipe

I likely will always have a couple of missing ingredients so a simple version has a higher likelihood of me being able to make it.

Some more people on youtube:

Steve Vivaldi
Al’s kitchen
J Kenji Lopez Alt
Food Wishes
Fallow
Derek Sarno
Johnathan Zaragoza
Rick Bayless
Anti Chef
Chinese cooking demystified

Eatingwell has been my go-to lately. I see lots of things that look enticing from triedandtruerecipe on imgur, too.

Check out this riggies recipe. You won’t be disappointed.

America’s Test Kitchen is pretty good, they go into the how and why of things in a way that’s really helpful if you don’t already know how to do things like “blanching” or “caramelizing” or “deglazing”. I’m a big ol dummy and it’s nice to have your hand held sometimes

No recipes - heavily Japanese influenced since he’s from Japan but a ton of great recipes from around the world

Damn delicious - love her spam fried rice but a lot of great Asian / pacific islander inspired dishes

Half baked harvest - a bit of everything but very garden to table inspired

I always check recipetineats.com first

Also I have started building a federated recipe site (well… Very early stages), so hopefully, one day, there.

Second for Half Baked Harvest. I love how cozy the site looks and the recipes are great

I mainly get them from YouTube and their resppective websites. My favorites are:

Babish Culinary Universe (Everything)
Pailin’s Kitchen (Thai)
Sheldo’s Kitchen (Sotheast Asian)
Brian Lagerstrom (Baking and American)
Curries with Bumbi (Indian)
Hanbit Cho (Baking)

Books.

Find your local used book store and see what they have.

Joy of Cooking Betty Crocker Cookbook The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American

Any recommendations for a site with metric units?

Budget bytes is a pretty good site. Especially if you are looking to save money.

Public service reminder: Your local Library carries cookbooks. When AI has destroyed cooking, get a Library card.

My most used resource in the kitchen is a culinary school textbook. Plenty of recipes in there if I feel like challenging myself, also good if I forget how to do something simple like how long to poach an egg for or how to make bernaise sauce. Probably can get one used for hella cheap, it doesn’t really need to be the latest edition anyway.

Internet-wise, check out the Marginalia search engine.

It’s good if you already know what you want to cook, and are just looking for a recipe. Marginalia is focused on indexing old blogs and stuff written by humans, and has tools that allow you to filter out blogspam and recipes that exist only to push affiliate links.

I prefer to avoid popular cooks and cooking websites because they structure their recipes around engagement and polished images & video work, and it’s aggravating. 90% of the time all I’m looking for is 15 lines of information. I don’t want to click that bell, I don’t want 4K slow-mo shots of someone cracking eggs to chill lo-fi beats, I want a recipe.