You may have noticed that we’re having some problems at Cookthink.com. The search tool and recipes are down right now. We’re working on it and will report back soon. Thanks for your patience!

Update: It’s all better now.

Along with our pals at the kitchn and three other worthy candidates, Cookthink has been nominated in the Best Group Food Blog of the Well Fed Network’s annual Food Blog Awards. Vote here!

Several Cookthinktankers were also recognized. Karina’s Kitchen was nominated in the Theme category, Steamy Kitchen was nominated in the Photography category, and VeganYumYum was nominated in the Individual Post category for this remarkable guide to food photography. Congratulations!

Please welcome Corinne Fay to Cookthink. Corinne started working up here in Cookthink’s “Montague branch” last month. You may know her already from reading the Root Source, which she now writes every other week, and from her Friday afternoon “Five Things To Do This Weekend” posts.

Corinne recently graduated from Smith College where she studied art history while crafting croquembouches in her tiny kitchenette. Before Cookthink, Corinne worked the usual string of student jobs — waitress, gallery intern, camp counselor — and also wrote food and restaurant reviews for her hometown paper.

A native Mainer, Corinne craves fresh seafood coated in butter and the tiny, low-growing blueberries of her home (not to be confused with the bloated, high-bush variety). Her most recent exploits in the kitchen: a batch of currant jam and homemade bagels.

We loved The Kitchn when it was a mere twinkle in Apartment Therapy’s eye, so we were delighted to see Emma’s post about Cookthink on Friday. Thanks for the love, Kitchn, and for really helpful posts like this one about which foods you can carry on the plane. We’re flying south tomorrow–our first trip since Angus has learned to crawl and snatch–so the food we take also needs to have very few moving parts. Suggestions?

This is a nice way to start the week: “Cookthink is kind of genius.”

In case you missed these mentions, here’s a short round-up of recent Cookthink.com-related press:

Last week, Mark Bittman featured Cookthink.com at his Bitten blog: “Are these recipes keepers?” (Congratulations, Mark, on the IACP Award for How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.)

In it May issue (on newsstands now), the Canadian lifestyles magazine Wish listed Cookthink.com as one of its 5 food trends you need to keep an eye out for right now. (Also listed: a microwave-in-a-drawer that may have Kristin reconsidering.

As devoted readers of dwell, we were excited yesterday to see Audrey Tempelsman’s post about Cookthink at the Dwell.com Kitchen Blog. “As a self-admitted epicurious.com addict, I’m loath to turn to other cooking sites for help,” she wrote. “But cookthink is worth a mention…” Thanks Audrey.

Finally, Chow’s Tea Austen Weaver picked up the Barbara Kafka Dessert Anthology, the new project we’re working on with one of our favorite cookbook authors.

If you’ve discovered Cookthink through one of these sources, welcome! We’re glad you’re here. Be sure to sign up for a free Cookthink account.

Hey cool. Fashion News contributor Desiree Marr was featured this morning in Lucky magazine’s Cute Outfit of the Day. When asked about her current online obsession, Marr wrote:

“Cookthink.com is a practical cooking site for single gals like me who often work late and come home to a (practically) empty fridge. You type in the few ingredients you have on hand and voilà, the site suggests a fitting recipe. You can also search by mood, including ‘doughy, hangover-friendly, and easy to clean’ —conditions often familiar to a single gal as well.”

Thanks, Desiree!

Be sure to watch Cookthinktanker Lauren Ulm, of VeganYumYum! Lauren will be demonstrating her remarkable talent of knitting with marzipan.

Reference: How to “knit” marzipan (VeganYumYum)
Reference: Knit-night Cupcakes (VeganYumYum)
Schedule: Check your local listings for the Martha Stewart Show

Congratulations Lauren!

UPDATE: Here’s the clip of Lauren on today’s show.

We hope you won’t mind a little pre-weekend, tooting-our-own-horn post. We just wanted to share with you some of the great press Cookthink’s been getting lately.

• Springwise picked us up, thanks to Jacqueline Zenn: “Take high-quality content, add a dash of searchability and a dollop of personalization, and what do you get? A culinary version of the music discovery engine Pandora, with the potential to be just as much of a success among foodies around the world.”

• Lifehacker followed soon after: “Web site Cookthink turns your cravings into reality, matching recipes with cravings by ingredient, cuisine, dish, or mood… In all it’s a one-stop shop for finding meals based on what you have and what cravings you’re looking to satisfy. Most of the recipes, I should add, look mighty tasty.”

• At PC Magazine’s App Scout, contributor Alan Henry broke down the Cookthink process: “Regardless of what you’re craving, Cookthink can help you find a recipe that matches the flavors you’re looking for… Cookthink was designed to help people take the types of foods and flavors they’re craving and turn them into real meal suggestions.”

• After playing around with Cookthink some more, Alan followed up at his blog Gears and Widgets: “Some people seem to think that any site about food has to be a massive database of recipes, and Cookthink isn’t that. The idea is to guide you to flavors and meal ideas that match the mood you’re in or the tastes that you enjoy; and it does that spectacularly well. If you’re looking for an all-inclusive list of recipes that you simply can’t stump even with the wildest requests, you might try Epicurious.com or someplace similar. Cookthink is a completely different animal, and considering its goal, it’s an animal I want to keep around to help my girlfriend and I decide what’s for dinner.”

• At Software Battle, Eric Norton did the Cookthink double-take: “On first glance, I almost mistook Cookthink as just another recipe site. Type in a couple of ingredients and it searches the database. But Cookthink, thankfully enough, is far more than a simple recipe site. It offers enough uniqueness to set it apart from staples like AllRecipes.com and Cooks.com. Yes, it has a “Web 2.0” flare to it, but there is much more working here than meets the eye.”

• While Brad Linder at downloadsquad quibbles with our use of “craving” (fair enough), he was still impressed with Cookthink: ” Ever have a craving for fish, but no recipe handy for turning your craving into dinner? Cookthink can help… As a keyword/tag based recipe finder, Cookthink is excellent.”

• fresharrival’s Chris Coyier was unflummoxed by our beta label: “I was pleasantly surprised [by] how fun and easy to use it was right off the bat… The site looks great, has tons of nice content (a blog, tips, reference, tips…), and is snappy. And they are still in Beta!”

• After playing around with the site for a while, Kate at infodoodads got excited about putting together a meal consisting only of broccoli raab: “Though the site has lots of features, like a food-related reference section with good definitions and explanations of tools, techniques, and ingredients, the most unique feature is a search by “craving”. Just type in up to eight cravings (be they ingredients, types of cuisine, types of dish, or “moods”) and then “cookthink it” to see a recipe suggestion based on your choices. It’s fun to see the suggested recipe that pops up, and if it’s not what you’re looking for there’s an option to see more. Also, recipes are accompanied by related tips and other recipes which will help me put together an entire meal based on my recent obsession with broccoli raab.”

• Christopher at iMod gave the site a spin and came away with this impression: “Cookthink is totally awesome!”

One last note: Back in December, Brys and I went to the Web Design World conference in Boston. (Great time.) At the end of the conference, several of the speakers — Jeffrey Zeldman, Lance Loveday, Steve Mulder and Jim Heid — got together and reviewed some of the attendees’ websites. I wish we had a link because it was really exciting to hear them review Cookthink. We don’t have a link, so you’ll have to trust us when we say that they all loved it. Citing “the very elegant simplicity of the layout,” Mulder loved how “the eye goes to where you want it to go… This is so much fun to play with, and the photography’s really beautiful.” Zeldman loved the colors we used at Cookthink. As he began to see how all the recipes and reference were connected at Cookthink, he said, “This is a web 2.0 cooking site. It’s a discovery site. I mean, I had no idea what “poke” meant until somebody poked me and then I poked them and then I got it.” Loveday admiringly described what we do as “reverse engineering the recipe,” and Heid wrapped it all by saying, “This is a very cool site.”

If you’re coming here from Lifehacker or del.icio.us and you’re a newcomer to Cookthink, you may have missed our post a couple of weeks ago about the Cookthinktank, a new project we’ve undertaken with a handful of cookbook authors and food bloggers.

We’re really excited to be working with Barbara Kafka, Coconut & Lime, hogwash, Rasa Malaysia, Steamy Kitchen and VeganYumYum. (Read our original post on the Cookthinktank.) Just a quick note here to say that we’re adding more recipes every day and are looking forward to announcing some new Cookthinktankers soon!

In the meantime, try these Minced Chicken And Pork Rolls from Rasa Malaysia. We made them two nights ago, and they’re all that.

Browse: Barbara Kafka recipes
Browse: Coconut & Lime recipes
Browse: hogwash recipes
Browse: Rasa Malaysia recipes
Browse: Steamy Kitchen recipes
Browse: VeganYumYum recipes