There are plenty of recipe and cooking web sites on the World Wide Web. Many cooks are seeking a sense of community for publishing their favorite meals, sharing family traditions or discovering new creations. For me, the ability to easily document a weekend dish I’ve tried for future reference is key, otherwise I’m left with a mish-mash of recipes scribbled on a multitude of different sized pieces of paper and filed who knows where around the house. So when I came across WeGottaEat.com a week ago, I was drawn to the intuitive, clean and easy-to-use layout. You decide how involved you want to get. I thought I’d take the time to hi-light a few features, so let’s take a look under the lid:
Registration is straight forward. Once you’ve chosen a user name and password, an email verification presents a link back to their site where you can then tweak your settings; page color, change your password and more importantly – start logging your recipes.
If you’re feeling uninspired in the kitchen, need to research someone else’s variation on Chicken Alfredo, or are looking to add like-minded chefs to your ‘friends’ list, the Discover Food page is where you need to start.
Clicking on ‘People’ at the top will show a ranking of the most popular members. User ‘Matriarchy’ is in a comfortable 1st place with 578 recipes to date. Selecting "Search" is probably the best way to find something new. You may also find something unique by searching under ‘text‘, ‘ingredients‘, or under several headings for ‘categories‘ and ‘features‘ which will assist visitors with dietary needs.
Their Blog page is used for sporadic updates. There is no comments section like the typical blog, so to get more of a feel for what’s going on in this community, visit their Forums page. Here you can have your say and read other member’s feedback, questions, concerns and ideas for improvement. Their ‘forum’ layout is not conducive to viewing categories of questions and topics. Only the last eight or so entries are viewable on any page requiring the reader to click the ‘next’ button more than needed. This is tedious. Every entry is treated as a ‘category’. They would be better served by using a shiny new www.lefora.com forum – it’s free and true to a standard Forum layout.
You can download all of your own recipes (RTF or XML only), view your friends, change the web site’s colors, change your User picture and edit your password from the Settings page. (An Adobe PDF format for downloading would be nice.)
I especially like the ease of starting a new recipe and entering ingredients. You start by adding a Title and description for your masterpiece.
You can also add ‘tags‘ at this point. Once this is complete, you’re ready to start adding ingredients, directions, notes and categories.
It’s easy to go back and edit any of these sections during the process. You can print out a "Products I Need" shopping list. You have the ability to add a note under each shopping item too.
If you want to try my recipe for "Pork It To Me! (or "Goulash A Go-Go!") You can check it out here: Pork It To Me! My three year old, who is picky about eating anything new, said: "Dad. Good Chicken." That’s just what the cook wanted to hear.
