There may be more chcoloate-chip cookie recipes than code on the Web, composed by sweet ladies named Aunt Lynnie. We've focused on deep, well-tested recipe archives that include photos and cooking instructions that won't leave you wondering when to beat the eggs.

Food Network
If you didn't follow Emeril Lagasse's maw-maw's slaw cooking demo on the Food Network the other night, catch him in slower motion here. The site boasts 15,000 recipes from the network's best shows, searchable by chef, cuisine or ingredient. You also get wine matching, terms and tips, ingredient glossaries and technique videos. Weekly menus offer ideas for carnivores, light eaters, celebrants and others.

Cooking.com
The 2,500 recipes here are some of the most coherent and organized on the Web, with beautiful photographs and sensible tips. Famous chefs, such as Carol Field and Burt Wolf, are featured in roundtables and video demos, discussing food origins, ethnicities and cooking styles. Also sells kitchen gear.

Cooks Illustrated
The Mayo Clinic of food-and worth the subscription cost. "We roast 38 turkeys to find the best cooking method so you won't have to." Every recipe is a problem-solving affair: How to make a carrot cae carot-y but not gummy? Soak the carrots in suggar. The site's got everything published in Cook's Illustrated magazine since 1993, including product and cookbook reviews.

Epicurious
More than 12,000 restaurant-quality recipes from the pages of Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines. Offers technique videos (e.g., how to butterfly a leg of lamb), weekly updates to reflect seasonal foods (watermelon screwdriver recipes at the start of Spring) and a database of 15,000 wines.

Foodfit
Calorie counting with panache. Fill out Foodfit's nutrition profile and it will shadow you from recipe to recipe, reminding you that you eat too much bread every day and not enough dairy. Thankfully, recipes do not suffer the same censure. They range from the pragmatic to the downright roust.

MarthaStewart.com
Always a perfect package: She begins with batter tips in Waffles 101, follows with a buckwheat sour cream waffle recipe and then ever so casually advertises her Martha-by-Mail heart-shaped waffle iron. Editors hold chats to discuss things like holiday barbecues.

Recipe Source
Formerly known as SOAR: The Searchable Online Archive of Recipes, this grassroots site boasts 70,000 international recipes and zero hype. Typing "ginger" into the strapping search engine yields 393 results, from ginger turkey to ginger snap, Ireland to Korea. No fancy technology or chef asides. Just the recipes here-Egyptian ful to hot fudge.