A friend of mine, Emily, is moving to New York to learn, as she puts it, a practical skill. After working in the arts for a while, and majoring in the arts, she decided drop the harsh, struggling lifestyle to learn a more generally applicable skill. You know, in a more technical profession where the skills are often utilized in any part of the world! What what did she decide on?
She’s pulling a Julie and Julia. Emily’s going to culinary school (and says she’ll even be blogging the experience)! I, similar to Emily and Linda from Better Off Ted, have secured a position in the time-wasters hall of fame by studying the arts. Thus, I’ve acquired a slight sort of envy for Emily… I thought about culinary school once, twice, thrice before… maybe more often. I love to cook. I love food. Okay, mainly, I love to eat! And these are reasons why I love Bing’s new detailed recipe results feature (brilliant segue, eh?).
Bing pulls from a variety of popular recipe sites, including Epicurious, Delish and MyRecipes.com. The feature also breaks down the search by rating, cuisine, convenience, occasion, main ingredient, course and cooking method. My only beef (pun intended!) with the feature? Not all search queries activate the detailed recipe search feature — simple is key here, it seems. Excited, I tried “coq au vin” and “lasagna,” but did not see the option for Bing’s new recipe search. Slightly disappointed, I tried simpler terms, “bacon” and “cheese” with success. Okay, so not the best recipe search utility — especially since simple terms give such a wide range of results. But that’s what the filters are for, right?
As someone that frequents Food Network and AllRecipes.com for food ideas, I think Bing’s new feature is awesome. I can’t wait to see how they will improve it. What about you? Do you agree?
1 comment
Annie Prince says:
January 25, 2010 at 2:30 pm (UTC -7 )
The best recipe site I have come across yet is AllRecipes.com. I love their ingredient search where you can input up to 4 ingredients you want, up to 4 you don’t want, plus an optional relevant keyword. There are also thousands of users and ratings and you can sort by the highest rated recipes as well as view others’ comments on how to modify the recipe. It has been great for my cooking skills and random cravings for ingredients I have on hand, like something with “shrimp and water chestnuts” or “sausage, spinach and pasta, but no red sauce” (I was out).
Good for Bing for entering the recipe space, though. I would be curious to know how many cooks these days – whether novice and veteran – don’t use a search engine. At least every now and then.