YouCook

Anybody want to buy a few hundred cookbooks? I'm not much of a collector, but I began buying cookbooks about 25 years ago when I took a baking class at Ivy Tech and started spending a lot more time in the kitchen. But, as I may have mentioned before, I hardly ever use them. They're still fun to browse through, but it's pain to actually find a recipe you want to make in them. If you want a good bean soup recipe, for example, you can spend a couple of hours looking through the books to find one that interests you. Or you can Google "bean soup recipes" and get thousands of them instantly. You can even Google the ingredients you have on hand to get just the right soup.

Now there's a tool that's even more fun, and it includes visuals. No, not the Food Network. That's as much an old-style medium as a cookbook. You have to watch on their schedule and cook whatever they decide to show  you on a particular day. But on YouTube, you can search for a specific recipe and see it actually being made -- what you want and when you want it. There are both amateur and professional demonstration videos, and you have to know your way around the kitchen enough to sort out the good ones from the bad ones. And you want get the number of hits you will on Google. But it adds a lot to the cooking experience.

Here's, for example, is a recipe for pot roast.