Pinterest takes Amateur Cooking to a Next Level
As an amateur chef, I always try to find simple recipes for a luscious and satisfying meal from all cultures. I look for recipes that give very detailed instructions because I’m usually cooking for friends or family and let’s face it no one wants to sit through a bad meal. Cooking takes preparation, ingredients, and a lot of patience. I definitely want the meal to be great from beginning to end.
I usually just Google the recipe, go food shopping and then it’s game time. But unfortunately there is room for error and a chance of ordering take-out if the meal isn’t what you expected so I like to have my laptop or phone handy to guide me through the process. What I love the most is when I successfully make a recipe, I save it in a folder on my laptop or in my bookmarks on my phone for future occasions not thinking about what happens if I lose my phone or my laptop crashes.
Everyone is familiar with the Food Network, the Cooking channel, and allrecipes.com but I recently fell in love with Pinterest.
Photo: Kevin Lynch (Closet Cooking)
They have a compilation of recipes in one location from a variety of sites that makes searching less time consuming. Not to mention, if I want to impress someone with their favorite restaurant meal I can simply search for Olive Garden’s Chicken Alfredo, Morton’s Prime Rib Steak or Red Lobster’s Cheddar Biscuits get the recipe and voila! They came up with the brilliant idea of pinning the item you are interested in thus as a member creating your own virtual bulletin board. If I wanted to share my own Jamaican Jerk chicken recipe, I could simply upload the recipe and make it viewable on the web.
I give them 5 out of 5 for accessibility, easiness and user-friendliness. Sometimes it’s the little things in life and this definitely tops my list because everything I need when it comes to food preparation is in one place. Whether I know exactly what it is I want to make or browsing through a plethora of ideas, I get excited which is exactly what cooking should be. Who knows you can be the Mario Batali of your own kitchen.
