Here’s a little set of tips to help you find the perfect recipe through FoodieView.
- Check your spelling.
If you find that you get only a few to zero results while searching for a common ingredient, chances are that there’s a typo. FoodieView has a *lot* of recipes indexed, so you should really get hundreds or thousands of results for any single item you can find in most supermarkets.
- Try searching for short phrases.
Searching for a simple basic ingredient like chicken will result in thousands of results. Maybe add another ingredient like chicken cheddar, or try a dish name like chicken casserole. I know we mentioned cleaning out your fridge using FoodieView, but you’ll probably do better doing it with just 3 to 4 complimentary ingredients at a time.
- Enclose phrases in quotes.
If you’re looking for a coffee cake recipe, you could search for “coffee cake” (including the quotes) and your results will probably be more on target.
- Narrow down the search by category.
All those links on the left side of the search results allow you to limit the search results to certain categories. So if you search for pie, you might want to limit things by hitting the desserts links if you’re not interested in recipes for chicken pot pie.
- Search for a specific dish name.
One of the great things about FoodieView is you can see different people’s takes on the same dish so that you can find the best one. Once you’ve used a general search to see what kind of dish you want to make, search again for that dish. So, for examples, search for chicken parmesan and choose whichever recipe sounds the most promising.
- Subtract foods you don’t like.
If you’re allergic to something like walnuts and pecans, you can remove all mention of them from the search results by adding the - sign and thing you want to remove. For example, for walnut-less and pecan-less brownie recipes, you would search for brownies -walnuts -pecans.
- Try alternate spellings for non-English dishes.
A lot of non-English dish names are just approximated in English, and have different common spellings. For example, you might want to try searching for kebab as well as kabob.
- Leave off accents and tildas.
If you’re searching for a crème brûlée, you’ll probably find more results if you search for creme brulee.