Ever draw a blank when you’re standing in front of a cluttered wall of wine at your local shop?

Wine blogger Dr. Vino has a pretty ingenious way to use an iPhone to keep a virtual wine notebook that you can refer to whenever your memory drops the ball. Check it out (Works on most other smartphones too).

Crowded kitchen making it tough to concentrate on that recipe that’s as long as a college textbook? Got home from work late and need to cook up something quick before your stomach eats itself? RealSimple.com has printed this great list of recipe steps that you can skip.

What’s better is that they offer substantial background on the reasoning behind the step and then they let their experts chime in on why its not necessary i.e.:

Instruction: Alternate wet and dry ingredients.
Why it’s done: Some say this is done to avoid a mess (adding large amounts of flour or liquid at one time would create clouds of dust or splatters). Others say adding flour at intervals means you beat it less, resulting in less gluten development and a more tender cake (glutens are strands of protein that give bread its structure; they form when flour gets wet and is then stirred).
Can you skip that step? Yes. Our experts disagreed on the exact way to incorporate flour and butter with liquid ingredients such as eggs and milk, but none insisted on a multiple-step program of alternating ingredients. The more flour you can mix into the butter and sugar before adding liquid, the less gluten development you’ll get, says Shirley D. Corriher, author of Cookwise , so dump in as much flour as possible before you add liquid.

Check out the site for more advice on things from whether or not to drain the excess liquid from a dip to why you can skip out on clarifying the butter if you’re short on time.

The blog Unclutterer points to some great resources for checking whether that unopened spice rack you got for college graduation is still any good.

Have you ever been cooking away merrily in your kitchen only to hit the brakes when you realized that you were missing one of the most important ingredients?

This ingredient substitute list from e-cookbooks.net is perhaps the most complete and useful free solution to the problem that we’ve seen.

For example, have a craving for pumpkin pie and you’re all out of pumpkin pie spice?  Checking the list will save the day when you find out you just have to add:

1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ginger
1/8 tsp allspice
1/8 tsp nutmeg

for every teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice the recipe calls for.

The list has tons of cool substitutes and even offers multiple options for some cases.  While the recipe may not taste exactly the same as if you had the real stuff on hand, we think this is a far better option than throwing out the food or going to Burger King.

What’s you favorite substitute? Leave omissions from the list in the comments…

Imagine a TV network that does nothing but cover the restaurant scene in major cities across America. Now imagine that TV network as a website and you have SavoryCities.com.

They launched their first portal for New York, are slowly beginning to roll out new cities across the country, and from the beginning it seems like they’re doing quite a job.

They have interviews with local chefs, news coverage, tracking of restaurant comings and goings, neighborhood guides written by local foodies, and ratings and reviews that probably come from your neighbors. It’s like having a contemporary version of the Zagat guides on your desktop coupled with the ability to peer into the belly of the restaurant world. One of our favorite features is the restaurant wish list, that allows you to keep track of all the restaurants you want to go to until you can afford them (ha).

The interface is very clean, accounts are free, and the’ve currently launched portals for New York, San Francisco, and Chicago with LA and Seattle on the way. This site is quickly becoming one of our most visited.