Some have described the 2000s as the "decade of the foodie," delighting in the culinary swell of cooking personalities, shows, websites and apps that continue to hit our palates daily. While others say that if they hear another word about some bizarre East-West gastro-mash up, disguising itself as fusion, they’ll throw up their bacon-herb cupcakes.
Regardless of how you feel about the word "foodie," or the questionable edible trends that find their way on to menus, you’ve got to admit that good food is always worth sharing.
Social media has created a digital dining table that seats the globe. Anyone, anywhere, can sit down and break bread 2.0 style, dishing on where the best pork xiao long bao can be devoured, what restaurant is a candidate for "Inside Edition’s Rat Patrol" and how to bake the chewiest, gooiest s’mores-stuffed chocolate chip cookies on this planet.
Whether you’re a gourmand, gourmet or just a regular person who loves to chow down, sans Frenchy title, there are a million ways to share what’s for dinner. Here are just a handful of places...
Search Engines
Foodily
More of a community than an algorithmic recipe bot, Foodily integrates with Facebook so you can share tasty concoctions, reviews, and menus with friends. Recipes are conveniently displayed side by side, making quick work out of comparing ingredients and nutritional information. And for those of you with violent food aversions, the offending ingredient can be omitted from search results.
Google Recipe View
It’s received some flak for the quality of its search findings. One cassoulet recipe claimed to pack only 77 calories per serving, even though the serving included a lamb shank and an entire sausage; while another cassoulet recipe declared a cooking time of one minute. But, Google treats Recipe View the same as all of its searches and churns up results based on popularity—the number of times the recipe has been linked to, reviewed and clicked. Suffice it to say, you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Websites
Foodspotting
Half geolocation guide, half review site, Foodspotting eschews snarkiness for a more positive approach, encouraging "food seekers" to upload images of delicious fare and vote on and bookmark meals they want to try. The point is to make eating adventurous and informed decision-making easy, no matter where you are in the world.
Tastebook
Recipe search. Check. Social networking tool. Check. Cookbook publisher. Check-check. TasteBook gives members an easy, affordable way to make their own cookbooks that can be shared digitally with friends and family as well as published in hard copy form. Is your compendium of congealed-salad recipes, handed down from your Great-aunt Eleanor, looking for a proper home? Create your "Gellin’ with Aunt Ellen" TasteBook and you’re good to go.
Blogs
FoodPornDaily
Only a staunch breatharian could pass up the decadent images slapped spread eagle across this site. FoodPornDaily’s tagline is "click, drool, repeat," and that’s exactly what happens as you feverishly search through community-submitted images, feasting your eyes on saucy numbers like "Succulent Chicken Enchiladas w/ Spicy, Smoky & Sweet Colorado Sauce" and "Juicy Grilled Burger w/ Blue Cheese Chipotle-Blueberry BBQ Sauce & Fried Onion Rings." The bonus? Not only is this site TSFW (totally safe for work), but you don’t have to keep your cursor preemptively hovered over the "x" on your screen in case somebody walks by.
FoodBuzz
This is a food blog aggregator cum social networking site that offers an impressive amount of information that spans all things food, worldwide. Community members upload images and videos, share reviews and create Buzz around recipes in the same manner that Digg members promote stories. Recipes can be searched by course, cuisine, diet, dish, ingredient and cooking method.
Videos
Rouxbe
Rouxbe takes newbs who’ve yet to master the art of boiling water and turns them into proper chefs. Culinary instructors created this online cooking school, which is free if you don’t mind limited accessibility to the site. If you want the full experience, for a monthly subscription of $29.95 or a yearly fee of $239.95, there are over one thousand instructional videos to choose from and the opportunity to receive personalized feedback from Rouxbe chefs.
Crash Test Kitchen
Laid back and low budget, these videos are created by refreshingly human cooks who make mistakes like everyone else. Crash Test Kitchen is a "vlog and podcast rolled into one," and it is its real-life depiction of what happens behind closed kitchen doors that makes it so accessible. No pre-packaged quantities or choreographed camera shots here; they rummage around in their chaotic-mid-sized-utensil-catchall drawer for a spatula, just like the rest of us.
Apps
Gordon Ramsay Cook with Me HD ($7.99)
Just in case you haven’t gotten enough of this irreverent chef swaggering across your TV screen, throwing around his Michelin-Starred bravado, you now have the Gordon Ramsay iPad app to help you in your own kitchen. It offers recipes, shopping lists, and an interactive cooking guide—and the best part is, you won’t get called a "stupid cow" for over-cooking the John Dory.
Grocery King ($4.99)
Android’s number-one selling grocery app—Grocery King v5.2 is updated frequently in response to user feedback. The latest version sports a cool feature that lets you keep track of grocery reward/loyalty cards and share or sync that information with anyone. To boot, you can create multiple shopping lists and share them across devices; scan product barcodes; compare retailer prices; and, add aisles, items, and categories with just one click.
