It's Thursday night, you've got company arriving tomorrow evening, you've been through your well stocked library of cookbooks and still nothing has lept out at you and said, "beat me, whip me, make me a souffle'...". It happens to all of us, that cook, at one time or another. We begin tearing our hair out, regretting we didn't make it "pot-luck" and then wishing we had gotten up early enough to catch Jeff Smith demonstrating yet another ancient phonecian recipe involving hearts of palm and fermented goat's milk. There is a alternative (but then you're way ahead of me already).

With Internet access an enormous library of cooking tips and recipes is, quite literally, at your finger tips. There are hundreds if not thousands of cooking related sites which run the gammut from major corporate sites, Spam [http://www.spam.com] for instance , to private individuals who put up lists of thier favorite things to prepare.

Among the private sites are Brian Edmond's Recipe Index [http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/edmonds/recipes/index.html]. It was here that, among a plethora of interesting items, I found his recipe for Golden Pumpkin Soup. Deeelish. Richard's Recipes [http://icnet.net/users/jrbrown/page1.html] takes a different approach. Instead of throwing them all at you at once, Richard gives us one a week. It might be fun to set aside a specific night a week to try a new recipe and Richard's got you covered. The week I visited the featured dish was Confetti Salad which looked wonderful. There is, Too Busy to Cook...I'm Surfin the Net. [http://www.lookup.com/homepages/51689//home.html] where one of the featured recipes is the fabulous Tammy O'Briens Stone Pizza Dough.

Nerds and Cyberbagels
Nerdworld [http://www.nerdworld.com] has a great recipe index as well as links many other cooking related sites. Among the linked sites is The Solar Cooking Site [http://www.accessome.com/~sbcn/index.htm]. This features methods and hardware as well as recipes for cooking with the power of Apollo.

There is the Dip Index [http://www..cs.cmu/~mjw/recipes/appetizers/dip/index/] with hundreds of recipes for, you guessed it, dips (not people who ARE dips, but things to dip other things in at parties and social functions without being arrested). Among the throng is a great one for African Red Bean Dip With Shrimp.

If bagels are your bag then there is The Bagel Site [http://www.jaka.nn.com/~scott/bagels/]. This is where you can find those hard to find classic recipe-to-bagel conversions you've been looking for such as "Bagels ala Queen", "Reuben Bagels" and the old-world "Welsh Rarebit Bagel" (the later actually contains a great recipe for the Rarebit sauce). The "Happy Crab Bagel" sounds out of this world.

The Mother of all Indecies

Of course if you are more the one stop shopping type, and less the "lets spend all afternoon searching the Net for variations of clam dip" kind of person, then there is truly only one place to go, Yahoo. Yahoo has the list of lists, the index of all indecies, but I digress.

The Food and Eating section [http://www.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Food_and_Eating/] is THE guide to food and eating on the Internet with links, not only to stand alone sites, but to other lists as well.. Here exists enough links to get an seasoned TV chef to knock off the cooking sherry, for good. What you are presented with is a list of sub-catagories from Bagels to Vegetarianism. All are hypertext links to other areas within the Yahoo cooking section. There is Cajun, Spam, Mushrooms, Seafood, Countries and Cultures and many more. The index is searchable by "keywords" (ie. "Blackened Catfish") or by winding your way throught the index level by level. It is all very user friendly and a breeze to use.

So come on along and I'll through a couple of shrimp on the modem for you.