Cooking on the web has become hot. Every time you do a search words like cooking, food, or chef, thousands of results are bound to pop up. To help you weed through the confusion, About.com has created a site called Home Cooking. Home Cooking is set up to be a forum for food enthusiasts, from gourmet to home cooks. It features weekly focuses, a 24-hour chat room, and a bulletin board to post recipes and share comments.
In addition to the weekly focuses, Home Cooking includes an extensive list of cooking-related subjects with past articles and related recipes organized together. Its main downside is the alphabetic organization rather than a topic-based hierarchy. With such a long list of subjects, such a hierarchy would help a visitor sift through Home Cooking's extensive subjects with ease rather than confusion. However, that being said, the site does offer a lot of information to the determined web surfer. For instance, its subjects include:
- Baby Foods
- Cookbooks
- Canning
- Commercial A to E
- Cooking For One
- Crowd Cookery
- Crockpot
- Edible Flowers
- Fat-Free Recipes
- Food Dictionaries
- Food Preparation
- Food Specifics
- Garnishing
- Herbs & Spices
- High Altitude
- History of Food
- How To Cook
- Lamb and Mutton
- Low-Carb Recipes
- Magazines / Ezines
- Measures
- Native American
- Newspaper Food
- Pressure Cooker
- Recalls & Alerts
- Recipe Collections
- Recipe Software
- Substitutions
- Sugar-Free
- Television Food
Because Home Cooking is one of many sites created and maintained by About.com, there are also links to other related sites maintained by the company. Examples include About.com sites focused on:
- Beer/Home Brewing
- Busy Cooks
- Cheese/Appetizers
- Coffee/Tea
- Desserts/Baking
- Entertaining
- Low Fat Cooking
- Nutrition
- Southern U.S. Cuisine
- Vegetarian Cuisine
Each of these sites has the same look and feel as Home Cooking, which makes users familiar with the site comfortable surfing through all of the related sites as well.
As with all About.com web sites, Home Cooking has an official guide to act as a source of online help to newcomers and a guide for the various focuses presented throughout the year. Peggy Trowbridge is the guide for the Home Cooking web site. As the Home Cooking guide, she answers questions posted in the bulletin board system, takes part in any scheduled chats and responds to any email sent to the site.
For the foodie that's willing to overlook some organizational confusion, Home Cooking can be an excellent resource. With hints and tips about kitchen concerns as well as delightful recipes and a series of related web sites to augment it, it's one web site worth visiting again and again.
Web Site Name: Home Cooking by About.com Web Site URL: http://homecooking.miningco.com/food/homecooking/ Seasoned Cooking Rating (5 = BEST): 4 STARS Editor's Note: The web site reviewed in this article was chosen from among those included in Seasoned Cooking's automated list of related sites. Anyone can add links to their favorite site related to food, cooking, health, fitness or hobbies by visiting our Seasoned Links page and clicking on the "Add/Edit a Site" button. We welcome your additions. Who knows? Maybe your favorite site will be the next one reviewed!