MEME MONDAY: GOOGLE RECIPES

There's a lot of food out there on those crazy interwebs and this feature, Meme Monday, highlights places dedicated to it, be they favored food-related websites, reference sites or, gasp, blogs.

I'll make no secret of it, Google is my home page. It's almost too useful. It's not brain surgery or anything but if you're interested in food and experimenting with recipes here's a quick tip for maximizing your internet searchability.

Type Recipes into the Google search field. You'll get a page full of links to various sites that offer recipes like some of the following: CopyKat (recipes for popular restaurant meals), AllRecipies, RecipeSource, and TopSecretRecipes, which "contains scores of original clone recipes, insider secrets and food lore."

But beyond the kind of hours of fun trying to duplicate the recipe for Coca-Cola® Blak® that only the internet can provide and reading about the secret of the blooming onion, you can also refine your recipe searches by cuisine and course.

Go ahead, try it. It's pretty useful. You get pages of recipes accompanied by pictures of the dishes you're searching or surfing for and if you keep scrolling you can move beyond the recipes provided by the website for Bon Appetit and Gourmet Magazines, Epicurious!

Select African and Appetizers and you get dishes like Roasted Red Pepper Salad With Harissa, Yeshimbra Asa (Pea Flour Fish), and Tunisian Fish Cakes With Lemon and Paprika Aioli. Try Japanese and Snacks and you get things like Chicken and Scallion Skewers, Yaki-Onigiri, Rolled Fruit Sushi and Nori Rice Balls. Try French and Desserts and you get recipes for Opera Cake, Blood Oranges With Grand Marnier Sabayon and Sauternes-Soaked Genoise With Kumquats.

You get the picture. Once you've selected a cuisine, a course, and clicked Go, you can also narrow your search down by ingredient at the top of the screen.