Cooking-challenged will like website

Of all the things college students are known for, perhaps the best description of the overarching view of the stereotypical student is appetite. Another is, of course, poverty. But at least one of those appetites can be helped by www.allrecipes.com, a site that provides recipes for absolutely everything.

A number of features make the site a good choice for finding edible options on the cheap. Perhaps the most glaring of these is that searching for “cheap” yields just under 100 results, while “budget” kicks out nearly 300.

Another helpful feature is the recipe box. Available on the free membership, the recipe box does exactly what it says on the tin: it allows members to save recipes, thus eliminating the need to hunt down a recipe over and over, or try to keep track of numerous print outs or downloads.

This feature alone is a major plus for a college student who needs to pick up fixings for dinner on the way home. Or for students like me, whose heads are so full of class and work, I often forget to update my grocery list.

For those who aren’t master chefs, there’s good news there, too. The recipes come with ratings, prep and cook times, and a serving size calculator that updates the ingredient list to show how much of everything is needed to make enough servings. Fair warning: the recipe directions will still show the original measurements, so when using that calculator, be sure to follow the directions, but use the amounts from the ingredients list.

Comments on the recipes range from the standard gibberish to actively useful critiques and corrections to the recipes, making this one of the few sites I’ve found where “read the comments” actually is good advice for the confused.

Perhaps the best part of the site, though, is the menu and shopping list feature.

Yep, www.allrecipes.com will take on one of your mom’s jobs and make your life easier by giving you prepared lists for food, and what you need to buy to eat it. Just drag recipes from your recipe box to the day on the menu planner that you want to eat that, and it will spit out a grocery list — 15, 20 minutes tops.

So for the student on the go who wants to eat a little healthier, or maybe just spend less than fast food would cost every night, www.allrecipes.com is a big bucket of finger lickin’ win.

Rating: A

Jeremy Cloud

Community Writer

To contact Jeremy Cloud, email communitywriter@occc.edu.

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