Allrecipes.Com at the Rachel Ray Kitchens!

I had the good fortune this past week to attend a blog event for Allrecipes.com.
I had no idea they were the world’s largest food site, receiving 535 million annual visits from home cooks who discover and share food experiences through recipes, reviews,photos, profiles, and blog posts. They also have 16 international sites around the world providing insights into the kitchens and cooking passions of home cooks everywhere. For more info visit Allrecipes.

I showed up at the Every Day with Rachel Ray Magazine Test Kitchen, fork in hand, and was greeted by the food spread you see above. You know I was happy when they asked me to just start eating as we got into the conversation.

They started by showing us how the site worked on a big over head screen. It was completely interactive and I could see how for the cooks in the home it could be an invaluable menu planning tool. I guess that’s why they get half a billion hits a year.

The new feature being unveiled was the interactive menu planner:

Access dinner and party menus, tweak them to suit your needs, or create your own.
Change recipes to suit your taste, then save them to your Recipe Box.
Choose photos, add graphic themes, include helpful reviews, and more.
Find recipes based on nutrition—a real time-saver for anyone trying to eat smart.

I was able to see first and how these features worked before we all got to cooking!

Deb of Seattle’s Make-Ahead Mama’s, a communal type of mom cooking group, guided us as we prepared our own meal from a recipe on the allrecipe site, Vegetarian Moroccan Stew. That is the dish on the right in the middle picture. Our goal was to ready all the ingredients so we could put the dish together at a later date, either after a short time in the refrigerator, or a time in the freezer. We cut onions, carrots, sweet potatoes, etc. We bagged kale, lentils, and more. We created our own spice mix, attempting to use the recipe as a guide, adjusting our mixture to the individual taste. When all our fresh materials were bagged we were presented with store bought items to complete the dish at a future time: organic chicken broth, garbanzo beans, and diced tomatoes.

I have to say this was one of the most interesting blog events I ever attended. Having us participate in preparing our own meal from the recipes on the site was really a new twist on things.

So, the next evening, I started cooking! I followed the recipe as well as I could (that means too much honey but I liked the result!) and voila I had my own Veggie Moroccan Stew! What a great concept this was! Of course mine was a little bit too liquidy at the time so I first used it as soup. My son, who has no developed taste buds (that’s an opinion, not medical fact), even tried it tonight as I had some (oops, with chicken) as a snack. I am planning to serve the rest of the stew over rice as a side dish accompaniment in a couple of days, if it lasts that long!

So head on over and check out Allrecipes.com if you are one of the few people in the world that haven’t already! You will easily see for yourself this site has it all for the home cook!

Disclosure: I received no monetary compensation for this post. All opinions expressed herein are always 100% my own. And they fed me!