Mealsmatter.org

If you like cooking only so much, and yet most of your meals are home-cooked because that's simply the most economical choice, then you're probably the kind of person who uses a few trusted recipes over and over again. No hassle, guaranteed success.

Mealsmatter.org offers you a great meal planner to help you set up a regular pattern of meals (whether weekly or monthly) and prepare your grocery list for it. Crucially, it also allows you to deviate from your regular pattern on special occasions, something that won't work on some similar sites like Dinnerplanner.com.

The site is owned by the Dairy Council of California, a government agency, and its purpose is to promote healthy eating. In keeping with this background, every recipe I look at seems to require some kind of dairy, so  beware of this site if you're lactose intolerant.

Setting up a meal
Adding a meal to your planner is simple. Whenever you inspect a recipe, there's always a button 'Add to meal planner' handy. By clicking it, you are redirected to the planner, where you decide on what day to make this recipe, and whether it's one of your repeating recipes.
Alternatively, you can start out in the planner, right-click the day you're planning for, and select 'Add a meal.' This gets you a popup window for that day. What may be confusing at first is that you don't immediately get going planning a recipe. First you have to specify what kind of meal you're planning (dinner, lunch, etc) and whether or not this will be a repeating meal.

From meal to recipe

Unless you've set up your meal by adding a recipe to the meal planner, you need to fill your newly created meal with actual recipes. There's a little link in the meal overview that lets you do this. This step should be made a little less cumbersome: first you choose between picking a recipe from your cookbook or searching among all recipes; then you get a big screen full of checkboxes to help you select the right kind of meal, and only then do you get actual recipes to choose from.

Once you're there, don't pick too many criteria. I checked boxes for these choices: (a) a dinner entree, (b) one hour prep time, (3) 'make ahead', and (4) low fat. That's how quickly a few choices can knock out a hundred thousand recipes you're theoretically choosing from. As soon as you've inspected the recipe and clicked 'Add to meal planner', you go back to the meal popup and see that the recipe has been added.

Usability

So the setup is right, but some of the details aren't. If you intend for a meal you're setting up to become a weekly event, watch out with the specification. As soon as you click 'Weekly', you get seven checkboxes for the days of the week - and they're all checked. In other words, your meal will repeat itself weekly on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, etc.

Recipe quality
What's particularly nice about Mealsmatter.org is that they do a lot of the planning work for you, if you let them. For each month of the year, the site offers six or seven meals which you can adopt with a single click (well, the single click creates a new 'draft' meal for you which you can then customize).

Philosophy

Mealsmatter has healthy eating and practical planning as its founding principles. And so do I... In fact, the website seems to be designed precisely for me (check out my profile at the bottom right) in that it helps you to make shopping easier and cooking more elaborate.

But there does seem to be a snatch in the logic. Cooking varied meals is much more fun if you don't have to worry about the shopping. Shopping is made easier when you plan a week's worth of meals, and planning is easier when you plan your meals to repeat themselves. However, cooking varied meals for fun doesn't quite square with a repetitive pattern.

Recipe quality: 7

Navigation: 6½

Appearance: 6

Gourmet.com

Not all recipe websites are doing well. One that's being phased out is Gourmet.com. There is an obvious reason for its demise: Gourmet.com is the web portal for Gourmet Magazine, whose last edition appeared this november. Evidently, the site in itself is not of enough value to its owner, publishing house Condé Nast, so they're copying the recipes to their more popular web channel Epicurious.com and leaving the Gourmet site to simmer for a transitional period.

Glamorous
The mission of Gourmet magazine, which started way back in 1941, was to show food at its most glamorous. For any recipes, the beauty of the accompanying pictures seemed to be more important than whether its mortal readers would ever be able to produce something similar in their own kitchens. Gourmet.com tried to take that philosophy to the internet - but profitably running a highly editorial product on the internet is hard if there is no synergy coming from a paid print edition.

So if you love fancy recipes with beautiful pictures, hurry up and visit Gourmet.com before it's too late! The magazine's almost seventy years old archive is already locked up, and who knows how these recipes will turn out once they've been forced into the templates of Epicurious?

Getting to a recipe
Obviously, Gourmet.com is about much more than recipes. That means finding one is not going to happen on the front page, unless you enter your search term in a small box there. Clicking on the 'Recipes + Menus' link gets you to a six-item overview of dessert and dinner recipes with large, attractive pictures. Right below them you get a longer list of text-onlye 'ten minute mains' and a narrow column of four 'web-exclusive' recipes with picture.

The upshot of Gourmet's editorial horsepower is that all of the above recipes consist of a title accompanied by a  one-or-two-sentence description. That means you can search for a title you like, then get a little bit more info before clicking through into the entire recipe. Gourmet.com is not at all unique in providing a short description, but their quality is certainly way above average.

Recipe quality
What to say of the quality of Gourmet's recipes? The descriptions are certainly complete and clear. They alert you if the recipe requires certain kinds of utensil that you may not have. They refer to knowledge pages about not quite self-evident procedures like charcoal grilling if these are in the instructions.

The ten-minute mains indicate that the website, at least, is not just about fancy cooking. Recipes are rarely just plain and simple in terms of ingredients, and when they are the photography will make them appear quite special anyway.

Printing
Something that might have received more attention is the print version of recipes. They're really not much more than the web page without ads and menus, and there is no easy way of not printing the large-size photo that comes before the ingredients and instructions. Measures can't be converted to metric. But at least you're not being forced to print out ads along with the recipe.

Navigation: 7
Recipe quality: 9
Look and feel: 8

PS: For an eloquent obituary for Gourmet Magazine, check out this New York Times article.

Foodbuzz.com

Foodbuzz.com tries to turn recipes and cooking into an occasion for social networking. Most of the recipes are not from the site's editors or users, but are simply links to original recipe sites. When you inspect a recipe, Foodbuzz keeps a bar at the top of the screen for you to rate the recipe and maybe put it in your recipe box.

Social food

What's special about Foodbuzz is the high social network value. It allows users to 'buzz' a recipe, meaning you express your appreciation of it. Users can set up a personal profile and make friendship connections (meaning you can import your Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail or other contact list), which means you get to see what recipes your friends like. When you log in, you even get a "what are you doing now" field not unlike Facebook's or Twitter's - except of course the question is "What are you craving, cooking, eating?" With a tick of a box, you even get to send the message to your Twitter account.

There is a downside to social networks, though, and Foodbuzz can't escape it. In the ten days I've been a registered member of Foodbuzz, I have received five friendship requests from total strangers, one of whom has the distinctly spammy user name "1click2know". Did I say spammy? It might in fact very well be an outright scam or malware. Another friendship request comes from a legitimate person called Linda Hum from Toronto, who maintains a food blog. Congratulations to her, but I have no idea why I would want to be friends with her, nor does she, since she didn't add any comment to her friendship request.

Commmercial food
Foodbuzz bets that active site users are probably better cooks, so it tells you for each recipe if the person who submitted it is a rare 'grazer', 'just eating' occasionally, or a 'feasting' regular. Interestingly, many of the contributors are companies, either those that produce their own food wares and have recipes for them, or those that are recipe websites in themselves. Foodbuzz has an entire section devoted to reviewing food-related products such as packaged foods and kitchen appliances. Nice if you're a brand fan and you want to tell the world about your passion, but there don't seem to be many reasons for the world to come to Foodbuzz and check out why you're so infatuated.

Variety
What is great about food buzz is the variety in recipe sources: after all, you are no longer stuck with just those recipes in the database of a particular website: anything on the web can be a part of Foodbuzz as long as it's indexed by the Foodbuzz search engine. You can easily submit your own recipe, whether by actually cutting and pasting text or by simply linking to a specific page.

Navigation
Okay, so let's get down to ease of use. Since Foodbuzz tries to be a lot of things, getting from the homepage to a relevant recipe is not as easy as on other websites. Once you've found 'recipes' in the menu bar, there is a great recipe search aid, allowing you to search by course, cuisine, diet, dish, ingredient (one only) and cooking method. The search pane also remembers your recently viewed recipes.

Search results are displayed in a slightly messy list of ten items. I say messy because they don't consist of a simple title, description, rating, and picture: They also have a buzz button, a buzz score, an author link, and a varyin number of icons such as the author's thumbnail picture or logo, a frequent-user-or-not indicator, and a logo for Featured Publishers. These things mostly serve the recipe contributors' egos, since there are so many recipes and so many contributors that this info is never really going to help a site user decide for or against inspecting a recipe.

On inspecting a recipe, things get both clearer and messier. Clearer, because the recipe stuff is divided into three tabs: the recipe itself, ratings and reviews, and "who's buzzing". Messier, because the page fully reloads each time you choose another tab. And messier because presenting someone else's website in a frame on your own recipe ususally involves conflicting visual styles. Whether or not the recipe prints (or whether it has a print view at all) nicely depends entirely on the site that Foodbuzz is linking to.

Navigation: 6
Recipe quality: 7
Look and feel: 6