Pictures can be deceptive, popularity isn’t everything, and you can’t taste recipes over the internet, so how are you supposed to trust the recipes you find? While I’m excited for my goal to try new recipes every week this year, I’ve been nervous at the prospect of trying new recipes without wasting my time on unhealthy, boring, or just plain bad food.

When I try new recipes, I learn a lot, I have fun, I woo my wife, and I save money that may have been spent on eating out instead. The problem is trying new recipes is only as effective as finding good recipes, which can be pretty hard. Fortunately, I’ve thought a lot about this process, and Cook’n has come along to help! Here’s a short list of the ways I use Cook’n to find incredible recipes:

Make Good Friends

This is by far my favorite way to find good recipes. Some recipe websites aren’t as motivated by good food as they are by earning money. They earn money by advertising a bunch of products in their recipes. To be perfectly clear, I see nothing wrong in making a living, and advertising is a perfectly valid thing to do. However, sometimes a website’s making money means they aren’t paying attention to the quality of their recipes.

This problem gets compounded when sites think they need to churn out new recipes as quickly as possible or they’ll lose subscribers. Quantity of recipes is not the same as quality of recipes, so I’m often disappointed when I can’t find anything truly “amazing” on popular food blogs.

The good news is I can completely avoid this problem with the Cook’n Friends feature. Here are the advantages of browsing recipes through my friends’ shared cookbooks:

• I know their recipes are tried, tested, improved and approved before I ever see them, so I don’t have to wonder if I’m wasting my time browsing their dishes. Thanks guys!

• A lot of my friends are not from the United States, which means they give me a direct channel to authentic cuisines eaten by locals in foreign countries. I can’t even describe how blessed I feel because of this!

• If I have a question about a recipe, I can talk directly with my friend instead of sending a message to a website that will probably never answer me.

I admit it: when I invite my friends and family to try out Cook’n, I do it because I want to steal their recipes. I suggest you try the same thing!

Try Recipes from the Cook’n Newsletter – Especially from our Recipe Videos

I was friends with Dan Oaks’s children from a young age, and I grew up fawning over his wife’s recipes. Since she is personally in charge of making the food for the Cook’n recipe videos, I know that they are always incredible recipes. They’re almost always a tier above other stuff I find online. Check out Kathy’s food here!

https://www.dvo.com/recipearchive.php

To save you the browsing time, here’s a list of some of my favorite recipes from Kathy:

Chocolate Filled Cream Puffs

https://www.dvo.com/recipes/chocolate-creme-puffs.php

Honey Dijon Fried Chicken

https://www.dvo.com/recipes/honey-dijon-chicken.php

Southwest Eggrolls

https://www.dvo.com/recipes/southwest-eggrolls.php

Customize the Live Recipe Feed

If I haven’t made it obvious by now, I’m kind of snooty when it comes to food – I don’t trust just anyone when they tell me something is “really good,” and it doesn’t matter how many people disagree with me. I know, it’s a tad arrogant. But I spend a lot of time cooking new recipes, and I’ve had to learn to discern dishes that have potential.

For this reason, I was ecstatic when I learned that I can customize my Live Recipe feed to reflect exactly which chefs and recipe sources I want. With help, I streamlined my feed to be everything I’d ever dreamed. No time wasted; no frustration; just outstanding new recipes. Check out this video to do the same thing to your Live Recipe Feed:

Trending Recipes

Whether it’s the recipe capture ticker scrolling across your screen, the Trending Today page, or the Premium-Only “most captured today” and “most captured this week” panels on your Live Recipe Feed, Cook’n is better than any app at keeping your fingers on the internet’s pulse of good recipes.

When push comes to shove, people should generally be trusted, and I trust the Cook’n community to find some incredible recipes that I can try.

Do you have any other ways you find recipes? How about favorite chefs or cookbooks? Let me know in the comments below!