Countdown to the holidays

We'll be headed to Chicago soon, which means trying to use up all of the perishables in our fridge. Back in the day, that meant a lot of 'stir fry everything together' and 'make a frittata with whatever's in the produce drawer. These days, there are so many online sources to help us be a little more creative - here are a couple of my favorites:

gojee.com has some of the prettiest pictures, presented in full-screen format. You can search for recipes by ingredients on hand by typing one into the 'i crave' box, or many into the 'i have' menu. You can also tell it what you dislike so that its search engine will avoid things that you wouldn't make. I can't tell how good it is at finding things that use many/all of the ingredients instead of just one out of what you've added. Adding chicken, milk, carrots and cheddar, I did find an apple chicken chili that sounds intriguing, and uses three of my four ingredients. gojee searches blogs (I haven't bothered to figure out how - another piece of evidence that the internet is making me dumber - I haven't explored anything about how this site works), and links you directly to the blog where the recipe is featured (in this case, Kitchen Trial & Error). so, it also helps me to explore the nets and find new blogs to bookmark. You can tag your favorite recipes, and share things via social network.

bigoven.com lets you enter up to three ingredients from its drop down menu, and gives you real time updates about how many recipes it has found that include all of your ingredients. there are 91 recipes (out of a database of 200k+) that include chicken breast, milk and carrots, including Thai Green Chicken Curry. The recipes are submitted by users, and other users rate and review them.  You can save recipes for later,  favorite them, or share them via social network. there is also an i-app, but I haven't tried it yet.

To save recipes I love, I'm still pretty happy with the paprika app on my iPad, but now I have to go back to work, so no posts about it right now.

I know, many people have probably been using these apps/sites for awhile. Other favorites out there?