Simply Recipes

Elise at Simply Recipes has gone and done (been doing) what I would so love to do but A) can't because I'm not as good a cook as she is, and B) can't because I can't take a decent photograph of food.

Of all the cooking websites, and there are trillions, I like hers best for several reasons. The way she indexes and organizes her recipes, for me, is very intuitive. There are a million ways to do this, as evidenced by the millin different ways cookbooks in print organize their contents, and I think it is just as important as the recipes themselves. Because if you can't intuitively find them? They might as not be there.

I also appreciate the elegant simplicity of the recipes she offers. Sometimes there's an exotic idea or ingredient thrown in there. Sometimes she tosses in a recipe that requires extra time, a special skill, or a particular utensil, but usually they are just really good, authentic recipes that anyone can make, and anyone would want to make, in my humble opinion.

Like her recipe for spanish rice. I have had some very bad spanish rice in my day. I have made some very bad spanish rice in my day. I have seen a million variations on how to get the tomato taste in there, some of which require laborious processes of cooking tomatoes, skinning them, pureeing them, and then using the juice while cooking the rice. This is too hard for me, and it will send me running back to Mahatma for the packaged stuff, which is pretty damn good if you ask me. But Elise allows for using canned tomatoes, doesn't ask for a bunch of hard-to-find herbs, and her product is flawless. I am a poor rice cooker, and I have not been able to mess up her recipe.

Disclaimer: She does have a particular fascination with oxtail, and I just can't get into that.

I also like how she always tells where she got the recipe, often crediting her parents or other family members in a very delighful and non-gushy nor overly sentimental way.

Her recipes read right, and are followable, unlike many that you find on the mass production sites like about.com. The process makes sense in the order she presents it, and for that I am grateful because I am forever mixing things together before I should because the recipe didn't stop me soon enough, etc.

Anyway, go visit her and write back. Tell me what you think, what you made, and how it turned out. And I'll review for you as I go as well.