ShopWell – ShopWell “is a free food information site that scores products on how well they meet your unique needs.” Get a personalized list of food product recommendation, based on your health state (lactose intolerance, athletic training, osteoporosis, high cholesterol and many others) while fully understanding food products’ nutritional info. Once you’ve signed up you can set your personal parameters (including age, weight , sex and age and the health state driving your nutrition, stated above).

Next, you can check ingredients you wish to include in your diet such as folic acid, saturated fat, whole grain, and ingredients you don’t want (such as corn syrup, added sugar, preservatives, etc.), and even state any allergies you may have so ShopWell will know what to avoid. See the image below.

The end result of ShopWell is a customized list of recommended products, each with a nutritional value score from 0-100, based on its suitability to your set of parameters. Getting your profile ready for smarter shopping in the supermarket is easy; ShopWell’s interface is appealing and user-friendly, and it’s free! (a free iPhone app is available). Why not make use of this healthy tool?

Slice – Welcome to this pizza central, a weblog covering all aspects of America’s most favorite carb food. Aside from providing mouth watering photos of pizza of every possible kind, Slice regularly posts (brought to us by Serious Eats) pizza news, reviews and videos.

Let’s just dive right in, shall we? Click the images below to read the wonderful pizza posts here on Slice.

I also thought I’d share this video with you, ’50-Second Pizza Party by Brooks Jones.

Delish – One of the most comprehensive cooking & recipe sites I’ve seen in a while, MSN’s Delish is truly a one-stop place for all your cooking, party hosting and food how-to needs.

Delish’s various features are too many to list here, but here are the main things I think you will enjoy exploring: the obvious, recipe collection, broken down to Popular -it’s where I found an amazing list of Under-30-Minutes Recipes– Special Features, and Hints & Help. More interesting sections include Parties & Holidays, Food in the news, and Coupons. Although Delish is an all-you-need resource for cooking, I recommend consulting our Cooking and Recipes pages for complementary websites.

Google Hotpot – If you’re already familiar with Foursquare, the Google Hotpot service offers the same underlining service concept -social networking with friends based on geo-location and business ratings- only it does it much, much better. Google has exceeded Foursquare’s service in every possible way, thanks to a large scale combination of the various Google tools; maps and street view, altitude, and search (including images, user reviews, related articles and loads more ) all come into play to offer an ultra geo-location service.

The end result is an all-you-could-possibly-need geo-location service, aimed mostly at the wine & dine aspect of entertainment (search restaurants, diners, cafes, etc.). You can see the screen shot below of the restaurant search I did, ending up with the Spotted Pig, a British restaurant in the West Village neighborhood of NYC. You will see how one page includes all the basic information (phone number, map and driving directions, menu), BUT there are also photos of the restaurant and its dishes (including a street-view), actual reviews of former guests of the restaurant, a list of related places and more formal, critic-based restaurant reviews.

I didn’t stop at the Hotpot’s eating-related business search and looked for cool museums to visit in San Francisco. Did Google Hotpot live up to my expectation? Oh yeah.

Just think of this service’s extreme usefulness in the mobile context. You could search for practically any kind of business or entertainment venue near you in real-time, in a matter of minutes, see what bistros your friends have been to and recommend others to visit as well, how to get there, even what to order. As expected, this is another phenomenal service by Google.

Bakerella – This is one of the top three winning Weekly Blogs of the week of Sep 20, and no wonder; what started out as a personal endeavor to keep track of her baking and decorating attempts, Bakerella quickly became the amazing baking blog it is today. Bakerella is a must RSS for all baking amateurs and professionals out there, and I just love the yummy photos and easy step by step recipes she encloses with every post.

So who is Bakerella? We don’t have a name as of yet, but we do know she’s a lovely baking fanatic who took an introductory cake decoration class a few steps further (and thank God for that!). Give the aromatic and sticky-fingered baking world a try. Make cakes, cupcakes, pop-cakes, cheesecakes and many other baked goods, all with tested recipes of the brilliant Bakerella. See my next baking to-do for this week, this Easy Apple Cake. Pic below.

Food on the Table – Unique in every possible way, this practical site’s concept “was born out of a need to get organized with menu planning, to create easy prep meals that everyone enjoyed and to save time and money at the grocery store.”

So, how does Food on the Table work, exactly? After you sign up (the basic plan is free, upgraded plans are available), submit your zip code and locate the various supermarkets in your area, and choose your top three. Next, set your taste preferences and food categories you are interested in. Then, click on Meal Plan and see which items are on sale based on your supermarket and food items settings. All you need to do next is buy the items and cook up a meal that’s within your budget and suited to your taste buds and nutrition plan.

Food on the Table is a great service, and it truly is a bliss for all the busy multi-child families out there where parents come back home from work to job no. 2 (family time). Thanks to Food on the Table, creating a healthy meal that’s on budget, on time and good is easy and quick.

Foodspotting – As opposed to the standard research-and-read restaurant reviews, Foodspotting offers an out of the box and in-your-plate take on food recommendations. According to their About page, “Foodspotting makes finding and sharing food recommendations easier: Instead of reading and writing reviews of restaurants, you can share photos of specific foods you recommend and see what’s good wherever you go.”

Foodspotting offers so much more than just dish recommendations with mouth-watering photos you can almost smell and taste; make use of the site’s Guides section where you will find recommendations made by renowned chefs such as Anthony Bourdain, Marcus Samuelsson, and Zagat restaurant recommendations, just to name a few. Foodspotting also has a feed page (People section) where users publish short Twitter-like messages for the rest of the community to explore. See the video below to learn more about the Foodspotting iPhone app.

The Bitten Word – A former Weekly Blog winner, The Bitten Word is Clay and Zach’s blogged account of their kitchen test drives of various recipes found in food magazines. Which magazines? Oh, only the best ones out there, such as Bon Appetit, Cook’s Illustrated, Food Network Magazine, Food and Wine, and many others. In addition, Zach and Clay throw in their own original recipes for you to try out. That is where I stumbled upon the mouth-watering Spicy Pork Loin with Watermelon-Rind Chutney. See The photo below and if you’re interested, click it for the recipe.

P.S.: For the best recipe resources on the Web, visit our Recipes Mini page.

 Look and Taste – Unlike my brother Shachar, I am a really lousy cook. Whenever I come across a cooking site, I wish I could find the time or the energy to sit down and try out some of the recipes (practice makes perfect, doesn’t it?). Look and Taste (formerly iFoods.tv) is yet another cooking site, but it stands out from the rest. Not only do they give you the complete recipes for their mouth-watering dishes, they also show you how to do it, step by step.

Their fun and instructive video archive of over 300 entries (featuring professional savvy chefs) give you a complete cooking show right at your fingertips. Another cool feature Look and Taste offers which many other cooking sites lack is their glossary of over 400 relevant terms. Don’t forget to check out their show, which is just as enjoyable and motivating.

This week on our Weekly Faves you may have noticed a site called Rouxbe, a startup from Vancouver, Canada that produces amazing instructional cooking videos.

Rouxbe has amassed a library of over 80 professionally produced instructional cooking videos. The videos are presented as multi-part, indexed flash movies in an attractive video player.

Recipes on Rouxbe also come in text form (which can be printed) and users are allowed to rate and comment on recipes.

At the first glance you would notice the high quality and production level of the videos. This site is a must for all you food lovers. So go ahead, surprise your loved ones with a gourmet dinner.

“Rouxbe delivers a revolutionary online instructional cooking experience that walks you step-by-step through each delicious recipe. It’s like having a private cooking school in your home, with a professional chef at your service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”