After moving into an apartment last semester, I realized that I would need to learn to cook and meal prep. Sadly, that resulted in me learning about 4 recipes and then cycling through them for the next couple of months, that’s why, this year I have made it part of my New Year’s resolutions to experiment with new recipes and enhance my cooking repertoire.
After deciding this, I began to scour about for new, fun-sounding recipe ideas and I decided to share my most successful sources with other future cooking enthusiasts. I hope these resources will help you on your cooking journey.
Friends and Family
Friends and Family are a great source of recipe inspiration. You can ask them for their favorites and recommendations and learn how to make your childhood favorites.
This past winter break, I talked to my mom about learning some of her recipes and she was happy to teach me them, showing me new cooking techniques as we made the meals.
You can try this with your parents, grandparents, or other family members. Another fun idea might be to have a cook night with your friends where you experiment with new recipes together, or just teach each other how to make your favorites.
Pinterest is a great creative platform that often has recipe boards, links to websites with good meal ideas, and it can even be curated to only show results that fit your dietary restrictions. If you hit the “Explore” button at the top of the webpage, often some sort of recipe prompt board will appear as an option.
I had a great time looking through the recipes that were on there and pinning them to my meal plan board.
YouTube
YouTube is not only a great source for recipe ideas, but it also provides you with How-to videos. Many creators on YouTube will film themselves as they cook which can assist you in the cooking process, teach you new cooking techniques, and even help to explain cooking techniques described in other recipe sources.
YouTube has taught me things like how to butterfly-cut chicken, how to saute vegetables, what is a broiler and how do you use it, and so on.
Social Media (TikTok, Instagram, Lemon8, etc.)
If I am completely honest, social media is what sparked my resolution to cook more this year. While the food I was making last semester wasn’t bad, the meals and desserts that the users on my feed were making looked to die for, and a lot of them looked easy to make. After making a couple of the recipes, I have already found some of my favorite cinnamon roll and dumpling recipes.
While social media is often restricted to shorter-length videos and can’t offer as much insight into the cooking process as YouTube, it has a lot of great recipes which are often accompanied by a link to a full list of ingredients and instructions.
Samsung Food
This one is a bit odd in the sense that I don’t own any Samsung-associated devices. While scrolling through social media, I came across this website that had a large community of cooking enthusiasts who would post recipes there.
Through here, you can find cooking communities that post recipes catered to all dietary needs. Do you want to start the Mediterranean Diet? They have a community for that.
Do you need cheap and easy recipes for beginners? They have a community for that.
Are you allergic to dairy, but still want to enjoy dishes with your friends? They have a community for that.
From what I have seen exploring this website, they have endless communities and you don’t have to own a Samsung product to be able to utilize it.
Grocery Store Websites (Walmart, Meijer, etc.)
This is another hidden gem I stumbled upon. While it is sometimes difficult to find on their websites, a lot of grocery stores will have a webpage dedicated to recipes with an ingredient list you can find at their store. This makes online and/or one-stop shopping for meals a lot easier.
One of the best ways to find these websites is to look up the store name and “recipes” (e.g., Meijer recipes, Walmart recipes, etc.). I have found that you might need to scroll past a couple of URLs before you find them, but they will be there.
The Interweb
My last suggestion is to just enter it into a search engine. The internet is full of recipe blogs, cooking community websites, and so on for you to explore. Many of the resources I previously listed were found by me just exploring through Google for a while.