Great new Aussie cooking site
The Mealopedia site is a welcome addition to the host of great cooking sites on the Web — and it’s Australian.
From the get-go, it doesn’t rely on the lure of glossy food shots — in fact, the home page is as plain as porridge, to use a culinary turn of phrase. Even when you get to the actual recipes, the pictures on the whole are not going to set you drooling.
However, when you get down to the nitty gritty, Mealopedia‘s feature set will blow you away and you’ll be racing to add it to your Favourites. As a keen cook, I certainly did!
The site has a focus on simplicity (and a blessed lack of pop-ups and copious distracting advertising) and the lack of visual bells and whistles actually adds to the experience in many ways rather than detracting fromn it. But what it lacks in the looks department, it more than makes up for with functionality and useful, useable content.
As well as browsing recipes alphabetically, you can search for recipes by category, an ingredient you have in your fridge or a keyword.
Each recipe gives a detailed rundown of the nutritional content, preparation and cooking times, number of servings, a rating, and even what wine type best suits it. One of my favourite features of this site is that you can scale each recipe to feed a different number of people. The site also has a tool for imperial/metric conversions, which is a great move if it wants to get traction in the US — most US cooking sites don’t pay any mind to users of the metric system.
If you’re stuck for inspiration, the site’s menu planner will solve all your problems and the shopping list generator will also save you time and hassle.
If you sign up to the site (it’s free), you can submit your own recipes to the site and keep your own little vault of favourite recipes.
Gail Lipscombe has worked for some of Australia's hottest tech magazines for over 10 years. In her blog, she focuses on demystifying technology, gadgets and the web for average consumers.