Struggling For Recipe Ideas? Here Are 5 Places To Get Inspiration!

It’s that time of week again parents - time to decide what the family will be eating this week. It’s time to draw up a shopping list, ingredients list and recipe list - even if you’re lacking inspiration.

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So instead of resorting to pizza and chips for the hundredth time, take a look down this list. From eBook downloads to YouTube videos, we’ve gathered all the best places for you to research and read recipes. It’s time for some fresh ideas!

1. Cooking eBooks

The reason I say ‘eBooks’ over regular books is that eBooks can store a lot more data. That means more recipes for you, and more ideas for you! Plus, with an eBook reader, you can store hundreds of individual books. Theoretically, this means you will never run out of ideas.

But firstly; where do you get these eBooks? Most eBook readers have a built in store, so try there. The selection may be limited, though. Alternatively, a site like Tradebit offers users the ability to download dozens and dozens of cookbooks at the click of a button. No more will you be out of ideas!

2. Recipe creation tools

One of the hard parts about coming up with recipe ideas is deciding what ingredients to use. There are hundreds to choose from, but which works best? Which will taste best?

Fortunately, the web is here to help. The advanced search tool on sites like AllRecipes lets you search for recipes by ingredients. So, for example, you could enter ‘buffalo chicken’ and ‘rice’ and be greeted with dishes containing those too. Or, you can choose to exclude ingredients from your search.

3. YouTube

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A lot of recipes are too long, too drawn out and not very engaging. That’s often what leads us to not cooking something very creative, or just whacking something in the oven.

But what if it wasn’t this way? What if recipes were engaging and made you want to eat that food? The advent of social media has seen the rise of many bitesize recipe videos which are plastered across YouTube. These are made with the intent to be shared, and as such are as short as you’re going to get.

4. Family recipes

Our families are full of hidden secrets. Did you know that your Uncle John is a two-time Olympic gold medalist? Or how about your Auntie Susan, whose claim to fame was appearing as an extra in Titanic?

Well, those probably aren’t true - but if they are, what an incredible guess! What’s more likely is that your family has that one special recipe, that secret that’s passed down from generation to generation. If you haven’t heard yours yet, now’s the time to ask - it could give you that inspiration boost that you need.

5. Try alternate cooking methods

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Perhaps you’re a bare-bones type of cooker. You like to stick with a familiar set of ingredients and don’t like to venture outside your comfort zone. And that’s fine! You don’t have to.

But there is a way to do this and still get great new ideas - try cooking the food differently. Instead of making chips, make those potatoes into a delicious sauteed dish. Braised meat tastes like an entirely different creation to roasted meat. Instead of frying those eggs, why not poach them?

The point here is that perhaps your cooking habits have grown a little stale. You’re using the same ingredients in the same cooking methods for weeks and weeks. By changing your cooking methods, you’re still in your comfort zone but are making things more exciting.

And that’s what cooking is all about.