Food and Recipe blogs
Love and Lemons
has been created by Jeanine Donofrio and her husband, Jack Mathews (“#1 taste-tester”). The blog’s name comes from the fact that Jeanine loves seasonal food, often finished off with a squeeze of lemon.
Most of the recipes on the site are vegetarian.
The blog was founded in 2011 and has been recognized by prestigious food and recipes like Food & Wine, Food52, Refinery29, SELF Magazine, and Oprah Magazine. It was named Readers’ Choice Best Cooking Blog by Saveur Magazine in 2014 and won a Saveur Editor’s Choice award in 2016.
If you are looking for a recipe, you can filter your search by season, holiday, special diet, meal type, or ingredient. Surprisingly there are only six recipes under the ingredient, lemon.
Cookie and Kate
is all about celebrating good food. Kate is Kathryne Taylor. Cookie is her dog – which Kate describes as a “mystery mutt,” or as a DNA test found, half schipperke and half dachshund/Australian koolie mix.
Kate is a photographer and cook from Oklahoma. She created the blog in 2010 and now works on it full-time.
Like many of the other top food and recipe blogs featured here, Cookie and Kate features vegetarian and whole food recipes.
The site makes it easy to search for recipes. You can look for recipes by Course, Cuisine, Diet, Everyday, Ingredient, or Season.
Minimalist Baker
is one of those sites where the name says it all. It shares plant-based recipes requiring 10 ingredients or less, 1 bowl, or 30 minutes or less to prepare. It publishes a new recipe every three days, with a mixture of savory and sweet dishes.
Dana Shultz is the recipe developer and blogger. She has a deep love for recipe experimentation and food photography. She has even expanded into creating a Essentials of Building a Great Food Blog Course.
Despite the use of the word “baker” in the site’s name, it covers many different types of (predominantly vegan) cooking – sweets, entrees, breakfast, snacks, sides, and beverages.
Smitten Kitchen
features delectable images of meals demanding to be eaten. Therefore should be no surprise that Smitten Kitchen has found great popularity with serious food fans.
Smitten Kitchen summarizes itself as being “Fearless cooking from a tiny kitchen in New York City.” It was created by Deb Perelman who obsessed with the intricacies of food and cooking. As she says on her About page, she loves being able to wake and cook whatever she feels like that day.
The recipes are the heart of this site. There is a particular emphasis on stepped-up comfort foods. The site also includes numerous tutorials on topics as diverse as how to poach an egg and how to make tart doughs that don’t shrink up on you.
Deb makes a point of only using commonly available ingredients.
The Recipes page splits all of the site’s recipes up by type, with additional subdivisions for Fruit, Meat, Sweets, and Vegetables.
Heidi Swanson’s 101
Cookbooks focuses on providing healthy everyday recipes. It currently features over 700 vegetarian, whole food, vegan, and instant pot recipes.
Heidi began the blog in 2003 when she looked at her vast collection of cookbooks and decided that it was time to stop collecting and start cooking. She was sick of repeating the same recipes over and over again. She felt it was time to explore the books in her collection.
As Heidi worked her way through her cookbooks, her skills and cooking knowledge improved, and she built her own repertoire of successful recipes.
Nowadays, Heidi chooses and writes about recipes that intersect her life, travels, and everyday interests. Often these are from her cookbook collection, but sometimes not.
Posts/recipes can be organized by categories (e.g., whole grain, vegan, pasta, chocolate, etc), by ingredients, or by season.
