Top 20 Places to Find Free Recipes Online

It's no secret that we're a bunch of die-hard, frugal foodies here at Shoestring, but even cooking meals at home and brown baggin' it can get expensive when you factor in all those pricey (yet beautiful) cookbooks and cooking magazines. We love expert food photography and tried-and-tested recipes as much as the next epicurean, but have found some great places to feed our fix online — and for free.

Here are 20 of our favorite resources for home chefs in the recession, listed alphabetically:

1. AllRecipes.com
All Recipes has been on the block for years and includes amazing tools, such as their Ingredients tab, which matches the items you have/want and none of the one's you don't (think: end of week and the cupboards are bare) with rated and reviewed recipes. We (and many of our hardworking, multi-tasking friends) also couldn't live without the All Recipes Dinner Spinner application for the iPhone. Simply select the Dish Type (main dish, dessert, beverage, etc.), Ingredients (beef, cheese, vegetables, etc.) and Ready In (for the amount of time/energy you have to spend cooking), and Dinner Spinner serves up dozens of relevant recipe matches. Create a free account online to save and retrieve favorites in your Recipe Box or create and save printable Shopping Lists.

2. America's Test Kitchen / Cook's Illustrated
Shoestringers grew up reading and cooking from Cook's Illustrated with family, and even though it — gasp! — is in black and white and has hardly any photography, its issues are collected and coveted by serious cooks and chefs. The website includes these tried, proven, test-driven recipes plus colorful and more contemporary equipment reviews, technical tips, product comparisons, and other contemporary content from the producers of America's Test Kitchen (ATK). The Tasting Lab ingredient reviews from ATK have long guided staffers to the best beef broth or aluminum pans on the market, allowing us to get the most bang for our gourmet budget. Also includes videos from the ATK television show on PBS.

3. Behind the Burner
Behind the Burner "offers access to the glamorous, exotic and sometimes chaotic culinary world." The video-driven site takes readers behind the scenes with founder Divya Gugnani as she interviews the chefs, restaurant owners, and other gourmets shaping contemporary cooking — including their tips for the best tools, techniques, recipes and ingredients. Shoestring staffers love the Behind the Burner Giveaways, where readers can enter to win the cookbooks, cook's tools, and other cool stuff highlighted in videos, articles, recipes, and blog posts from Gugnani and her team.

4. BravoTV.com : Top Chef
For any fan of the smash hit reality cooking show, Bravo's Top Chef official website is the source for free recipes, contestant blogs, behind the scenes videos and other insider info. Use the Top Chef Recipe Finder to try your hand at dishes made by your favorite "cheftestants" from a particular season, or search by Cost, Skill Level, Cuisine, Mood (seriously!) to narrow down the hundreds of recipes from all six seasons of the show.

5. Chef on a Shoestring at CBS
All the recipes, grocery lists, and budgets from the popular, weekly Saturday morning TV segment on CBS's The Early Show. The best chefs from around the U.S. are invited to take $20 to purchase their ingredients, then they demonstrate how to make a three-course meal for four with what they've bought. The companion website includes a Recipe Finder, complete video archives, and a Food Savvy Quiz to find out just how much of a frugal foodie you really are.

6. Cooking by Numbers
It's definitely not the slickest looking site on the Web, but it sure can be the handiest. Cooking by Numbers allows you — even more easily than AllRecipes, but with fewer recipes and a much smaller (read: one author) community — to check off only the actual ingredients in your fridge and pantry (from 50 pre-set standards) and then returns 20 matching recipe results at a time. Our favorite? "A cup of coffee. So you only have coffee? Well make a cup, ponder life and why you have no food in the house." Also check out the Skills by Numbers section for helpful visual tutorials on certain cooking techniques, especially if you were thinking of going all Julie Powell and working your way through a classic (library) cookbook this winter.

7. Eating Well
Since 1990, the glossy version of this upscale healthy food magazine has been serving up great stories and recipes for living the good life, and can be found at Whole Foods grocery stores and other fine health stores. Now, its publishers have made Eating Well's recipe archives available completely gratis online. We love the Food News & Origins section, including health and safety information and tips on where our food actually comes from, and the pet food / pet diet tips and photos of the editors' furry friends in the Pets of Eating Well section. Afraid you can't eat healthy or organic on a budget? Check out the site's article on 6 Superfoods Under $1 and tell us if you still feel that way.

8. Edible Communities
Edible Communities is a publisher of regional editions, like Edible Philly and Edible Phoenix, available free in print form at local supermarkets and convenience stores. Online, the Edible Recipes section compiles the best of the best from all around the country, free and searchable, so home chefs can discover dishes that "celebrate local foods, season by season," or join Edible Nation by subscribing to their free newsletter.

9. Epicurious.com
Home of Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines, Epicurious is the gourmand's dream come true — including all of the, as we like to say, "food porn" (aka high-end food photography) from the print edition, as well as exclusive guides, blogs, and slideshows for online readers. Download the Epicurious iPhone application, or, if you're a foodie through and through, compile your favorite recipes into a custom-created Tastebook, a tangible investment of time and money that can be purchased and enjoyed as a hardcover file in your home kitchen.

10. iChef
No idea what you're in the mood to cook tonight? No sweat. iChef's recipe categories are broad and specific — like Dessert Recipes and Egg Recipes, Cheesecakes and Breakfast and Buns — which comes in handy when you're stuck in indecision central. If you're in the mood for some procrastination, play the free Meal or No Meal game, built by Addicting Games for iChef as a fun, foodie play on Deal or No Deal. (Win big!)

11. Mealtime.org
Free recipes for "can cooking" or "semi-homemade" meals on a shoestring, brought to us by the Canned Food Alliance. Need we say more? Clip your coupons and go.

12. MyRecipes.com
MyRecipes is the one-stop epicurean home for all the archived recipes and food articles from Time, Inc.'s All You, Cooking Light, Health, Coastal Living, Real Simple, Southern Accents, Southern Living, and Sunset magazines. Registration is free, and the My Recipe File tool for bookmarking favorites and creating shopping lists is completely addictive. Also, check out the Menus & Parties, Kid Approved, Slow Cooker and Healthy Diet sections for specific types of recipes, as well as the How-To guides for learning new kitchen skills on the fly.

13. PBS
Home of Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Ming Tsai and more famously giving gourmets, PBS now focuses its online content on its collaboration with Everyday Food from Martha Stewart. Browse free recipes and watch free instructional videos to find "nutritious, delicious recipes that are simple to prepare and easy enough to cook everyday."

14. People Magazine's "Dinner for 4 Under $10"
In this weekly feature from People, now on People.com, editors and guest chefs compile themed menus, like Oprah's NYC Treats and how to Throw a Lost Finale Party. The articles are hosted free online, and slightly hard to find even through on-site searches, so look in the Entertaining or Great Ideas sections.

15. Recipe Star
With a tagline like, "Recipe Star wants you to become awesome at cooking," who wouldn't fall in love with this site? Created by San Franciscan Matthew Inman (who also launched a free dating site and a free coupon directory), the entire aim of RecipeStar is to create an independent "gimungus" community for people who can cook and those who can't but desperately want to learn. Check out their fun Food Quizzes, like Are You Addicted to Bacon?, and vote in the Food Fight between recipe searches.

16. RecipeZaar.com
The online home for recipes from Scripps Networks, parent company of HGTV, the DIY Network, and Food Network, Recipe Zaar includes meal and menu ideas from the celebrity chefs and TV hosts you love plus entries from regular folks in their online community of home cooks. We love the Menus tab, a searchable section tagged by clever ideas like The Kids Are Coming This Weekend!, Inexpensive Meals, Fall Breakfasts, Mexican Night, and hundreds more.

17. Serious Eats
A community of food bloggers, like the infamous Slice (of pizza) and A Hamburger Today (obvi), among others, this site regularly features awesome restaurant reviews and menu ideas, like its current collection of Fall Recipes.

18. SimplyRecipes
We love that Simply Recipes is a blog — created and updated by a single, passionate foodie named Elise Bauer — in which all of its several hundred recipes have been tested by either the blogger herself or by her friends or family. Bauer compares the site to "someone's recipe binder or card catalog."

19. Stonewall Kitchen
Creating a dish with inspiration from this site is as easy as 1-2-3. First, select a Stonewall Kitchen Product (which can be substituted, of course, with a similar product). Second, type in another ingredient. Last, select a Recipe Type, such as Main Dishes or Dressings & Sauces, and voila! A brand new recipe to try, test, and (hopefully) file in your recipe box.

20. Whole Foods
Not only do we love the slew of free samples Whole Foods doles out in their stores, but we love their selection of free recipe listings online, too. If you're gluten-free or vegetarian, for instance, you can browse recipes by Special Diets; or, peruse their other unique categories, like Budget, Make Ahead, No Cook, and One Pot Meals.

Story: Copyright 2009, Shoestring LLC. Photo: iStock