by Julius Albert Custodio

Created on: February 12, 2010

Have you ever had that kitchen dilemma of not knowing what to cook even though you have lots of food in the fridge? Sure, you could just use a cookbook to find new recipes to try, but isn't it such a chore to scan through a lot of pages just to find that single recipe which will fit the ingredients you have at hand? I bet it would be nice if there's a website out there where you can just input the ingredients you currently have and then give you a list of recipes you can cook using the said ingredients.

Well the food gods may have listened to everyone's prayers because Supercook (http://www.supercook.com) is a website that could do just that. It's a search engine which takes in your list of ingredients, analyzes them one by one, and then aggregates the results from different recipe databases around the web like Recipezaar, Foodgeeks, and Allrecipes. For a concrete example of how Supercook works: putting in eggs, oil, milk, and bread in the ingredients search box will give you a link to a French Toast recipe in Recipezaar and a list of other recipes which utilizes those four ingredients.

Supercook also has an Exclusions tab for the vegetarians, vegans, people who are on a strict non-fat diet, people who can't consume peanuts or shellfish because of food allergies or people who just can't stand the taste of broccoli. Just put in the ingredients that you don't want to use (e.g. peanuts, shellfish, broccoli) and Supercook will eliminate those recipes from your search results. This feature is also pretty handy for your loved ones who are picky eaters.

A keyword search box also pops out below the ingredient search box after you've typed in your first ingredient. If you don't like scouring through the recipe list just to find a soup recipe, then just put "Soup" in the keyword search box and the results will only show soup recipes. You can also put "low-fat" "sugar-free" or "gluten-free" in the box as an alternative to the Exclusions tab mentioned earlier. With this neat keyword search feature, Supercook pretty much covered all bases for all your searching needs.

Aside from its increasing popularity among food lovers, Supercook has also gained the honor of being named as one of the 50 Best Websites of 2009 from Time magazine and deservedly so. With its easy-to-use interface and its fairly simple goal of revolutionizing the way to search for recipes online, Supercook is a testament to the fact that small websites such as this can stand among the giants.

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