Recipe Page – New Design!

I enjoy cooking.  I am not a culinary genius by any means – but I love food.  Food and cooking mean something to me.  I can get really emotional about cooking.

Food means family and friends and holidays and special events.

Food is nourishment, as parents it is our responsibility to make sure our family has good, healthy food on the table.  It is also our responsibility to show our children (ours are grown now) how to cook and prepare meals for the families that they will one day have.  Our 21 year old daughter asked me to make a Frito Pie so she could take it to a friends house.  I explained to her that it was a very easy recipe and I was confident enough in her cooking skills to know that she could handle it without my help … and she did, proudly texting me pictures of enough Frito Pie to feed an army!  Our son has a group of friends that have weekly dinner parties, sometimes one person prepares all the food, while other nights it is more of a pot luck.  One recent evening was Italian and another was Taco night.  It is always fun to cook with and for other people and it comforts me to know that our son, who does not live at home, is eating real food on at least a weekly basis.

One of the best things about cooking is finding new recipes.  The internet is full of sites that share recipes on just about anything you can think of.  I, however, like to depend on my trusty cookbooks with the worn pages and handwritten notes on the recipes that I use often and probably modified somewhere along the way.  I just had to pack up the kitchen of someone very close to me that had recently passed away.  In the pantry was a cookbook, one that I had given him … and that he used.  A few dog eared pages showed me that he tried his hand at some of the dishes in the book.  I had a good feeling as I gently packed up the book, I will give it again, maybe to one of my own children and it will have meaning.

Recipes are meant to be shared, passed down, prepared and enjoyed.

When we started SpicesInc.com we knew we wanted to incorporate healthy recipes (well, at least for the most part) into our content.  We try to link recipes to the spices that are in them and also to other dishes that might compliment the dish.  It is important to not only offer our customers the highest quality herbs and spices, but to also help make suggestions on how to use those ingredients.  You will find that most of our product pages link to recipes that use that product.

After many comments from site visitors regarding our recipes we realized that we wanted to redesign the main recipe page to not only list some of our most popular recipes, but to showcase them.  It then became clear that the best way to represent a favorite dish was to photograph it in a way that translates to the reader just how good it is.  I have attempted many a recipe because of a great photographic presentation and have turned away from recipes that did not look as appealing.  For these reasons we set out to redesign our recipe page and have finally and proudly put it up to be used by our customers.

So while you can”t always see the handwritten notes of a favorite recipe in one of our trusted cookbooks we wanted to share some additional hints, thoughts and ramblings on the recipes that we are adding to our site. So unlike the various shared recipe sites you will be getting a little bit more on each recipe.

I am working my way through making and photographing more of the recipes, so you will see new recipes as well as new feature photography to accompany the dishes.  The photography is not super fancy – we eat what we shoot (is that a hunting pun?) no tricks with cotton balls and sharpie markers – what you see is how it was actually prepared.

Redesigning this page was not only functional but emotional, a labor of love.  We can feature recipes that may introduce our customers to an interesting spice they have not tried before, but also a way to pass on recipes that are good, and nutritious and may even become a favorite in your family.

Please let us know what you think.  Is the page easy to navigate? Do you find what you need? Is there anything else you would like to see?   Your feedback is valuable in helping us put together a page that is useful.  Click here to see the new and improved Recipe Page.

Also, coming soon is a new feature we are working on called One Spice/Five Ways where we hope to take a spice or seasoning and feature it with at least five different ways to use it.

Thanks and enjoy!

Tagged as: recipe page, recipes, site improvements