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.

Sonic cookbook tonight

Bad Manners / Thig Kitchen, they had a website which now seems to be gone, but there are also cookbooks, both paper and ebooks. It’s vegan but they’re some of the best recipes I tried, vegan or not.

I honestly don’t use recipes. I cook the food until it’s done and put whatever seasonings I enjoy in it.

A word of caution about Pinterest: Pinterest Is Being Strangled by AI Slop

If it works for you, great but be vigilant. Especially when you’re putting what you find on there into your body.

Public Domain Recipes
FOSS recipe list with very basic UI

I’m aware. I’m also an experienced cook that would not add just anything to my food, or use improper cooking times and temps. I own a copy of the Betty Crocker cookbook that is my baseline for baking and meat temps.

Ummm… What?

Thank you, I had no idea this existed or how badly I needed it.

Marginalia is good for this. It can be hard to find recipes with very specific requirements, but I’ve bumped into so many cool personal websites with recipe collections just by searching for “[name of one ingredient I want to use] recipe”.

Some websites found that way:

• https://urchin.earth.li/~aendr/recipes/
• https://jessey.net/recipes/
• https://pikemalarkey.neocities.org/recipes
• https://caolan.uk/kitchen/recipes/
• http://biobug.org/recipes/
• https://grimgrains.com/site/home.html

That website seems really nice! I wish it had some more recipes though. I was trying to figure out how to make rye bread recently and every recipe felt wildly different, probably half of them were AI written. It gets so frustrating finding anything online these days.

YouTube has been most reliable for me. If you see someone showing their process/results and multiple people do it the same way, that’s a pretty good indication that it’s worth trying out.

Generally I just wing it, have been cooking so long I can develop my own recipes for most things. But sometimes I do have to look for tips, and will read recipes for inspiration.

Food:

Bon Appetit

Recipe Tin Eats

Boy who Bakes

Perfect Loaf

Food and Wine

NYT Cooking

Cocktails:

Punch

Imbibe