My Secret Weapon

People often ask me where I get my recipes from. I've collected some of them from friends and family over the years, but when I need a recipe for a specific thing and I don't have one that has already been time-tested and approved, I look it up on Food.com. This website is absolutely genius. It's like having a panel of regular people who are ready and willing to share their own time-tested and approved recipes. You can search by recipe or ingredient and sort by the highest ratings. I used it several times over the last week.

For Thanksgiving, I wanted to contribute but didn't have a ton of time or money to do anything too elaborate (plus my relatives and my mom have been doing it so well for years) so I wanted to bring something a little different. I searched for cranberry sauce and this was the top recipe that came up. I tweaked it a bit (used half orange juice and half water rather than all water) and it came out absolutely scrumptious. It also lead to this beauty of a creation:

Cranberry sauce and brie grilled cheese. Yes, it was every bit as decadent as it sounds. Gotta love Thanksgiving leftovers.

Then, on Sunday I was watching Rachel Ray's Week in a Day on Food Network and she made chili. It was a special type of chili that didn't really appeal to me, but the thought of eating chili and watching football was too enticing to pass up. 

I started by looking up vegetarian chili recipes since my roommate is vegetarian, my parents are trying to eat as little meat as possible and I knew I was going to have to share since it would make so much. When I looked up vegetarian chili recipes specifically, I wasn't impressed by the recipes I found. They weren't too highly rated and I didn't want to run out to buy ingredients to make a chili recipe that wasn't tested and approved by the Food.com community, so I searched regular chili recipes. This is the highest rated recipe and it calls for coffee, beer and cocoa, so naturally, I was intrigued. I swapped out the ground beef for veggie meat crumbles and added an extra can of beans and it was fantastic. 

So, next time you need a fantastic recipe for something you've never made before, check out Food.com. It's a great weapon to keep in your back pocket!