Not long ago, if you wanted a recipe you called a friend or your mother, checked a cookbook or two, or clipped the pages from your newspaper’s food section. If you wanted unusual food products, you scoured your most forward-thinking supermarket’s shelves or ordered from specialty gourmet shops with mail-order catalogs.
Now, there is a wealth of new options, just a few clicks away on the Internet: You can decide what to eat, order ingredients, buy the pots to cook them in, and even plot how to shed the extra calories. In fact, there are so many site choices that you can easily get waylaid and never get to the immediate task at hand: cooking and eating.
But there’s a solution for that problem too. Sites allow you to make restaurant reservations on-line, including booking a romantic corner table and receiving directions to get you there on time.
Marijke Neely, executive chef at South Gate Cafe and Bank Lane Bistro in Lake Forest, uses the Net as her personal dining guide. When she cooks, she often takes recipes off www.foodchannel.com, the Food Channel Web site. Her husband, Tod, manager of the restaurants where she cooks as well as Bank Lane Bakery, uses the Net to gather management tips and wine ratings.
The proliferation of food-oriented sites has been so swift and widespread that it’s difficult to get a handle on the number. In just one day, a curious observer scanned 25. Two caveats: Sites are constantly evolving, and some may include original recipes that have not been tested in a professional kitchen.
Most of the sites surveyed provide recipes from a variety of sources: well-known food companies (www.kraftfoods.com); food-related organizations such as the Canned Food Alliance (www.mealtime.org); star chefs such as Bobby Flay, who offered a cold-weather menu (www.cooking.com); big groups like Yahoo! Clubs that allow amateur cook-members such as “Patty in North Dakota” to share recipes, techniques and tips (www.clubs.yahoo.com); small clubs where users such “Geri,” “Linda” and “Krystle” create their own sites under a common umbrella (www.homestead.com); and discussion groups where questions posted ranged from how long to bake a challah to who has the best cheesecake recipe (www.remarq.com).
The sites know no boundaries. The former www.goutsdefrance.com site, renamed www.goodfrance.com to make logging on easier for Americans, brings food products directly to U.S. kitchens from Isabelle De Montille in Beaune, France.
De Montille, who is from a winemaking family and who remembers being taken as a child to one of France’s premier restaurants the way some American children start off at McDonald’s, scours the French countryside for products from small purveyors that shoppers might not find even in Parisian shops. “They’re from small craftsmen who don’t sell beyond their area,” she explained. The service isn’t cheap, however. To get some pate, foie gras, crepes, choucroute or marmalade within two to three days, shoppers might spend about $30 for delivery of just two pounds of merchandise, she said. If they could wait two to three weeks, the cost would drop to between $10 and $14. She is working to add products from other European countries and to pull together a network of distributors in the U.S. to cut costs and delivery time. Also on her site are recipes from local chefs on how to use more obscure products such as olive cream.
In a similar vein, a site developed by two Northwestern University MBA students, Subhash Bedi and Parry Singh, stocks more than 20,000 ethnic foods and offers universally appealing recipes such as guacamole and Chinese fried rice (www.ethnicgrocer.com). Type in a country and a food, and see if a product match emerges. “Parsley” and “Italy,” for example, brought up garlic parsley fettuccine, available in a 12-ounce size for $3.29.
A similar site out of Seattle (www.chefshop.com) also offers recipes, products and food lore. On a recent day its “foodbite” covered the lowdown on differences between hazelnuts and filberts, how and why to eat peanuts, ways to make shallots “a perfect partner for mushrooms,” and an explanation of the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, with a menu to conclude the fast.
A giant on-line community cookbook (www.allrecipes.com) features thousands of tested recipes such as chocolate syrup brownies and raspberry-vinegar chicken. It also features recipe requests. On a recent weekday, someone wanted to know how to make chicken cordon bleu while another sought ideas for a Santa Fe chicken.
Some sites are very comprehensive. For example, www.cooking.com includes cooks’ tips, 4,000 recipes, recipe matches based on key words (20 for “chocolate cake”), 5,000 products such as Falk Culinair copper cookware or Henkels cutlery, a changing lineup of cookbook authors and restaurateurs discussing hot topics, a weekly menu planner and a menu of the day, be it Sunday supper or Thanksgiving dinner.
When you’re not in the mood to cook, the Internet makes it easy to order in or eat out. One site, www.cookexpress.com, offers convenient meals in its kits that are shipped overnight to selected markets. They take 15 to 30 minutes to heat and can be ordered in any number of servings. Recent menus included mustard-glazed chicken with spaetzle, shiitake mushrooms, French beans and poached garlic jus ($9.25 per serving), or Omaha steaks with garlic mashers, roasted mushrooms and brandy cream sauce ($16 a serving). Each order provides instructions, nutritional content, ingredients the company provides and what the customer must have.
For food plus other help–dry-cleaning or photofinishing–www.streamline.com bills itself as a lifestyle management service to save busy families at least three hours a week, said a company spokeswoman.
The company, which now serves only Boston and Washington, D.C., but plans a national rollout, supplies a refrigerator/freezer that requires a garage and charges a $30 monthly fee, but there’s no minimum order. Shoppers also get a keypad access system that allows delivery persons to drop off groceries, prepared meals made fresh by a local caterer (recent offerings included black beans with saffron rice, crab cakes with a remoulade sauce and lemon squares, biscotti or chocolate chip cookies), or even CD-ROMs if you want to make meals yourself.
And if you don’t feel like staying home, don’t. Several sites allow you to make restaurant reservations on-line, including www.restaurantrow.com, which has more than 110,000 listings from 47 countries and 7,000 cities. And the numbers are growing.
The site allows searches based on a range of criteria from locations to type of cuisine, ambiance and entertainment. Each listing provides menus, photos, reviews, events, maps and directions. Among the restaurant participants in the Chicago area are Blackbird, Everest, Tsunami and Bennigan’s.
Also offering reservations is www.opentable.com. Diners search by area (San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and New York so far), by table availability at a specific time or by cuisine. A recent attempt to get a table at Wildfire at 8 p.m. failed, but the site was kind enough to tell of openings at 6:15 and 8:45. Diners can indicate special needs such as food allergies or a table away from a front door. The service sends a confirmation and can notify your guests by e-mail. So far, though, choices in Chicago are minimal.
At www.food.com, you can order in food by typing in your location and how far away from it the restaurant should be. A recent attempt provided just one choice–a pizza joint.
After so much potential cooking and eating, you may grow worried about possible weight gain. But again, don’t. The Online Health and Fitness Network site, www.efit.com, suggests easy stretch exercises–and more than pushing yourself away from the table–plus healthy products such as a heart monitor, as well as a personally tailored exercise and nutrition plan with recipes once you fill out a questionnaire. The site is expected to be up and running before the end of the year.
