Top 5 Food Websites

I'm always trawling the web for inspiration for new recipes, checking out culinary methods and developments and reading restaurant reviews so I thought that I'd share my Top 5 food websites and why I like them. I follow a lot of excellent food blogs too - I'll be posting my favourite ones shortly...

Guardian Food & Drink

Huge collection of food & drink news, recipes, restaurant reviews and listings.I check in at least on a weekly basis and the content is always fresh and plentiful. Yotam Ottenlenghi, Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall and Nigel Slater all feature on the rich roster of columnists. The Word of Mouth blog is updated daily and often sparks reams of comments. Be sure to check out the Observer Food Monthly section for your monthly digest of all things food.

BBC Food

Surely the best recipe database on the web? The look and feel of the website has changed but scratch beneath the flashy new surface and you'll still find an encyclopedic collection of tried and tested recipes from BBC cookery shows, celebrity chefs and various other publications. The Ingredients and Techniques section are really informative and useful resources - particularly to budding amateur cooks. Beware -  the link to the latest food and drink shows shows on the iPlayer could mean that an intended five minute browse of the site leads to a marathon TV catch-up sesion. I recently watched a week's worth of the Great British Menu back-to-back!

Eat the Seasons.co.uk

This site is one of the simplest in existence. Every Wednesday the home page is updated with a list of what ingredients are at their best and in season. It's a great resource for ensuring that you're eating seasonally and getting the tastiest (and cheapest) products that Mother Nature has to offer. Check out Eat the Seasons on a weekly basis and you'll never miss the onset of the wild garlic season, the best of British strawberries or the first of the autumn ceps.

Farmer's Markets.net

A no bells-and-whistles information website in which you can locate your nearest farmer's market via a clickable map or postcode seasrch. The strength in this site is that it features over 500 markets and contains up-to-date reliable information (unlike some other listing sites which have a tendency not to be updated as often). It's particularly useful if you're heading away for the weekend and want to see if there are any farmer's markets in the area. The markets listed are all independently inspected by the National Farmers' Retail & Markets Association (FARMA). FARMA ensure that they're genuine farmer's markets and not the disappointing alternatives that masqerade as farmer's markets that I'm sure everyone has come across. I haven't used the Farm Shopping.net or the Pick Your Own.Info sister sites to any great extent but if they are cast in the same mould as Farmer's Market.net then I'm sure they'll be worthy resources to bookmark. 

Epicurious.com 

This resource is vast and must be one of the largest on the web. The site includes a massive catalogue of recipes, menus, articles and guides. My favourite feature of the site is that when you sign-up (for free) you can then save your favourite recipes in your 'Recipe Box' and even add and share your own recipes. The Food Dictionary is really useful (especially when trying to decipher a convoluted French recipe) and the Conversions matrix is great for converting to and from metric or working out how many mililitres are in a teaspoon!

Any other food websites that you couldn't live without? Share your links in the comments section...