My favorite sources of inspiration

I got a text a few days ago from my brother-in-law that read:

I'm calling in a huge favor...Can I have some inspiration for things to make for dinner? On a beginner to low-intermediate level of difficulty. 

First, I'm super proud of him because he's such a great husband to my sister, looking for more ways to help contribute around the house. (I'm a fan of both my brothers in law, just to be clear.) Next, I started thinking about what kinds of recipes I think my sister and BIL would like...mind goes totally blank, followed by massive overload of ideas.  Maybe they'd like some bean dishes. I've got that super easy, use whatever veggies you have on-hand, stir fry I know they like.  Maybe some slow cooker recipes, or stuff you can throw on a grill.  It was a flood of ideas but nothing that helpful.
I recalled the adage "give a man a fish, feed him for a day..."  Well, if you give someone a recipe, you give him an idea for one meal. But if I share where I get my recipes, and more broadly my meal inspiration, I'll teach my BIL to fish and feed him (and my sister) for a lifetime.  So, here's the fishing lesson.

Make the ideas come to you
In my mind, the absolute easiest way to get meal ideas is to invite them into your email box.  There are a plethora of daily and weekly email newsletters that contain links to recipes, food news, kitchen equipment ratings, and general food writing.   I've subscribed (and unsubscribed) to a great deal of these over the years, starting and stopping them based on how much I enjoy reading them and how useful or annoying I find them.  Here are my favorites, in general order of preference:

• Bon Appetit has a daily newsletter that I read religiously. It has a great mix of recipes and articles, and is the perfect supplement to the magazine and podcast. There is usually a letter from the editor in chief once a week, with other test kitchen chefs writing on the other days.  The emails generally have a theme (Asian meals, vegetarian mains, weeknight chicken dishes, cooking with alternative grains, etc.) with 4-6 recipe links included.  The Bon Appetit website also hosts 2 partner sites, Basically and Healthyish, both of which have their own newsletters. Basically is devoted to giving step by step instructions (with videos!) to preparing recipes, some of which may seem daunting to people with limited cooking experience; this presentation makes them more accessible to anyone interested in trying something new.  Healthyish, as the name would imply, is their site featuring recipes with a healthier spin, though in no way any less delicious. The Healthyish newsletter also has ideas for general healthy living; recent articles featured topics such as dealing with being alone during quarantine, reviews of a meditation app, and links to articles and podcasts having to do with managing the whole COVID-19 "shelter in place" without going totally crazy.  You can sign up for any/all 3 newsletters on https://www.bonappetit.com.

• Epicurious, founded in 1995, is a site that contains every recipe published by any Conde Nast magazine, including Bon Appetit and my first food magazine love, the now defunct Gourmet magazine. You can read all about the site's history here. Epicurious has 3 newsletter options, which you can subscribe to by creating an account (free), going to settings, then selecting newsletters. I like Cook This Now and The Top Ten the best; I found Trending Recipes to be somewhat redundant. 
• Mark Bittman, a former food columnist for the New York Times among other publications, and a prolific cookbook author (he's behind the "How to Cook Everything" series), has a newsletter and website I truly adore.  His recipes run the gamut from the simplest of rice dishes to complex baking projects.  His website features recipes from his cookbooks, which are designed to simplify the cooking process, starting with a building block recipe first, then providing ideas for enhancements and substitutions; the cookbooks also provide lessons on techniques and how to choose ingredients.  I'm also a fan of his website design and the photography.  It's very clean and easy for me to look at.  You can sign up for the newsletter here.
• Deb Perlman of Smitten Kitchen is a self-taught chef with a nack for great writing and a penchant for beautiful photography. Her weekly newsletter is on the longer side, because she goes into great detail about recipe background and provides step by photos. Each issue features a few recipes and articles, and includes links to recipes featured that week in previous years (what Deb calls the "archive dive").  Deb's recipes never disappoint, and I've also read her 2 cookbooks, which I recommend wholeheartedly. 
• Another self-taught chef, Tori Avey had a site called The Shiksa in the Kitchen that started about 10 years ago. A friend introduced me to the site and I've gotten many interesting ideas from it.  Tori rebranded her site a few years back, with the simple address of Toriavey.com.  She writes about cooking, both traditional Jewish foods as well as foods of numerous other cultures, history, travel, and gardening. I like her writing style and photos, which she takes herself. The newsletter is published weekly. 

• Similar to Epicurious, My Recipes is the site for recipes (and articles) published by Meredith Corporation, the publisher of numerous magazines among them Food and Wine, Eating Well (which absorbed Cooking Light in 2019), Better Homes and Gardens, and many others.  There are 6 options for newsletters through My Recipes, but you can select from many others that are related to other Meredith publications. 
• More a compilation of articles and ideas, TASTE has a newsletter that frequently gives me recipes (or at least inspiration), but also keeps me abreast on food trends, culture, and history.  They have 3 newsletters, of which I receive The Latest (their main newsletter). It comes out about 1-2 times per week.

Love your library

I love the library.  In fact it is possibly the place I miss visiting the most since shelter in place began in early March.  A library with a large collection of cookbooks is a fantastic way to learn about different types of cooking, whether methods or cuisines, with virtually zero investment (unless, of course, you forget to return the books on time).  Hop on over to the non-fiction section and you'll find the cookbooks with call numbers beginning with 641.

What about when we are stuck at home?  Again, technology can bring the library to you. Many libraries participate in online library services, such as Hoopla and Overdrive (AKA Libby), that allow you to borrow digital media, including e-book cookbooks.  Sometimes you can even access very new books, or books that your local  library may not have.  I've noticed e-books can be hard to read on a small screen, so I would advise using a computer or tablet to read them, as opposed to a smartphone. 

Storage solutions 

So you've read some cookbooks and your email box is full of ideas, now what?  You need a way to store everything (preferably digitally) so it's easy to access.  I've been using The Cookbook App for several months and I'm in love with it.  I had countless printed recipes in notebooks, plus recipes saved in various websites' recipe boxes.  The problem was I couldn't remember where the recipes were, so I ended up not using the recipes I was so excited about because I couldn't find them.  

Enter my savior, the Cookbook App.  This app (iOS and Android, about $5) and accompanying website is my no-limits recipe manager and meal planner.  You add recipes by uploading them from another site, taking a picture of a print recipe, or entering one manually.  Add tags such as "baked goods", "vegetarian", "Mexican" etc., so you can easily find your recipe. You can add notes or change things in a recipe as you wish; I uploaded a moo shu shrimp recipe last week and turned it into moo shu chicken.  In the meal planning feature, you assign recipes to particular meals on specific days, adding notes or adjusting the size of the recipe you plan to cook.  So I may be cooking a chickpea dish for dinner that calls for couscous, but in the notes I write that I'm serving it with rice.  On another day I plan to cook a stew but only half the recipe (which the app will calculate for me) and a double batch of bread so I can put some in the freezer.  Or maybe I want to leave a note to remind myself to use a mix of red and green cabbage in a salad because I have both to use up.  The Cookbook App helps me do all of this.  There is also a shopping list feature, though I have not used it. The app is fully optimized for use on a tablet or phone; you can view recipes and the meal planner on the website, but you can only plan meals on the app.  If you want to send a recipe to someone or print it, these options are available as well.  Since November, I've loaded over 600 recipes, not only from websites, but also from photos I took of recipes in cookbooks I borrowed from the library, as well as family recipes I had written on scraps of paper shoved in notebooks.  In short, it's the best.

There you have it. Where I get ideas for cooking, and how I keep those ideas in a place I can find and use them.  I hope this fishing lesson has been helpful.