Karen suggested that it might be helpful to have more recipes for a particular condition, and that seems to make sense. One of our observations is that it can be difficult to find a lot of variety within a particular set of restrictions, which in turn might lead to the food being inappropriate to your caree’s taste, or just get boring over time with a lot of repetition.

We thought we might start by looking for sources of large numbers of recipes for a particular condition. We’re beginning with diabetes, since that’s an increasingly common example with well-established nutritional guidelines.

There are several web sites which specialize in recipes for diabetes. Diabetic-Recipes.com is a site devoted to making possible “fabulous meals” and promises 800 recipes and 200 menus.

Diabetic-gourmet.com is a site based on Diabetic Gourmet magazine. The interface seems more segmented and searchable (by meal, style, etc.)  but it was hard to figure out how  many total recipes there are … we did what we thought was the widest possible search and got over 600 recipes.

Diabetic Cooking magazine also has a site (diabeticcooking.com) which has a somewhat more rudimentary interface and (we think) about 800 recipes.

Another approach we tried is to go to one of the BIG recipe sites, and look for recipes that are tagged diabetic.  We went to allrecipes.com, which claims 40,000 recipes in its dabase, and searched on “diabetic”. The result was 71 recipes … a little disappointing. However, under “Healthy Cooking” we found a collection called “Diabetic Recipes“, which was a nicely organized page with articles, recipes, etc. as well as a meal planner (for members). Looks like almost 500 recipes in the collection. (Strange that the search didn’t provide a link to the collection.)

We then visited myrecipes.com and had more success. The site claims 50,000 recipes in all. A search on diabetic yielded about 2,000 results, and a link to the “featured collection” of Diabetic Recipes, which promised “thousands of delicious diabetic recipes including low-sugar snacks, healthy entrees, and sugar-free diabetic desserts”. This also looks like a well-organized interface to recipes, articles, tips, and videos.

Finally, there’s the old fashioned non-digital (or less digital!) approach of finding a cookbook on Amazon. And (lo and behold) a search of “diabetic cookbook” on Amazon yielded over 700 results.  You probably already have a few of these cookbooks, if you’re cooking for a caree with diabetes. Most of the books seemed to contain about 200 recipes (except for the ambitious “1,001 Delicious Recipes for People with Diabetes“), so any one cookbook is not likely to generate a lot of extra variety. But you can certainly focus your search, since some of the books specialize in everything from diabetic soul food to seafood, 1-pot and slower cooker recipes.

So it seems like there’s a lot of possible variety out there. Based on what we’ve found so far, myrecipes.com certainly rises to the top. We’ll be posting on more different conditions later. If you’d like to visit our Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/CookingforCaregiving) we’ve already posted on variety of resources. Thanks very much!

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