Don’t know what to cook for dinner. Pull out that cookbook and find something good to eat. Ah, but you’ll have to go shopping or scrounge around for the ingredients already in your cupboard.

Or you could power up the browser and head off to a number of cooking websites that can help you find that next meal.

Many recipe websites offer everything from photos to shopping lists to reviews by other users. No more guessing how it will turn out when you try it yourself. Photos of the dishes from multiple viewpoints and users help to show what the final product should look like and any tricks you should try.

If you have a couple of ingredients you want in your meal, there are tools to search for recipes that include some of or exactly those ingredients. It’s like the opposite of a cookbook. You won’t need to go to the store, or at least not tonight. Need to reduce the number of proportions? There are tools that split or multiply the quantity of ingredients by the number of servings you need.

There’s also the social networking side of meal planning. Need something new and refreshing?  A popular recipe could be the answer. Stay away from those recipes that are rated least popular.  You can even discover people who have similar tastes and look at what they recently cooked.

And don’t forget that these receipes are not just in text and photos, but include video clips as well. You don’t have to sit through a whole 30 minute or hour long show waiting for that one dish to be completed and placed on the table (often through some magic of television).

If you become an expert at cooking, you can share your recipes with the members of the community. You may even receive critiques and suggestions like adding another seasoning to make your dish even better or a variation like chicken instead of beef. Maybe even a vegetarian version that you would never have considered.

You can learn a lot about cooking from the community. Are you hungry?