When wondering through the internet looking for useless information on whatever tickled my fancy at that particular moment I managed to stumble across what seems to be quite a fad in the on-line world. These are RECIPE GENERATORS. Recipe Generators are easy ways to get recipes and food ideas without the hassle of leaving your kitchen for more ingredients. You simply type into a small box whatever food you are faced with in your cupboard and "voila", you are given a recipe! I went onto studentrecipes.com to try it out for myself. Sadly the ingredients I had in my cupboard and fridge weren't looking rather useful. Carrots, Ham, Potatoes, tinned tomatoes and cheese.... I was then given a list of foods that I might be able to cook with these ingredients. The only thing I was told I was able to make without any other ingredients was "chips". Now..... no matter how minute your knowledge of food is I'm pretty sure that everybody knows 'if you cut up potatoes and fry them you get chips...'. Simple. However when looking down the list I realised how much I could do with food. The list which was titled "1 ingredient needed" was vastly different. "posh carbonara" headed the list, followed by "cheese and potato casserole". I found myself reading slowly down the list finding myself intrigued by the amounts of different foods that I could create from simple starting ingredients. Every ingredient has been added by users of the site who either have picked up a cookbook and added their own touch to a dish, as suggested by Franco in  Really Useful Ultimate Student Cookbook, or simply have created a brilliant recipe of their own which they want to share with the world. Although this  website and other sites that use this Recipe Generator may not present their recipes as easily and openly as a cookbook might, they are a useful way of sharing recipes, passed down through generations, or simply created themselves. These generators and forums are like those old, tattered and worn cookbooks your grandparents pull out, filled with recipes they had picked up from friends and family for decades, each page splattered with what looks like the same tomato based sauce , sticky, broken, cherished and loved. Are these websites and recipe generators the cookbooks of the future or are they just a student fad?