CookDinner is a new recipe service from the makers of mealopedia, and boy is it tasty. The team has taken the best bits of the past effort and rolled them up into a beautiful new dish [enough with the foodie stuff already – Ed].

The site basically offers a wide range of specially selected healthy recipes, with ingredients and instructions, along with a bunch of really standout features. For instance the way it’s presented, with a beautifully clear interface and lots of valuable Ajax features to minimize page refreshes.

But it doesn’t stop there. Hit the servings button drop-down and the ingredients instantly change to reflect the number of people you’re cooking for (no laborious page refresh). You can send a text SMS of the recipe shopping list to your phone instantly from the recipe page, and there’s a set of user reviews and cooking tips for unusual ingredients which offer great advice to get you going with unfamiliar dishes.

By far the most impressive feature though is the Meal Planner feature which you can find under the Search button (for some strange reason). Select the week’s meals and number of people to cook for and the application automatically fills your Basket with a weeks’s worth of menus, along with a list of ingredients you need to buy for your shopping list (which you can then SMS to your phone of course).

It even shows you if there are any special offers in your area (you set your country and location when you use the optional registration function), and you can set your preferences for different likes, dislikes and allergies, so if you’re on a low carb diet you can set that into the system and only receive low carb recipes. Similarly if you’re allergic to gluten, diary etc. Brilliant.

Oh and yes you can create meals based on the stuff you’ve got in your cupboard and fridge, although I would like to see the interface for adding in ingredients here a little easier than a drop down, but that’s a niggle comment really. All recipes are designed to be made in under 40 minutes, and you can store your favourites for instant access in Your Cookbook.

Overall this is the recipe service to beat right now. The interface is beautiful and super functional, the feature set is top notch, and the content is wonderfully healthy and appealing. One request would be for more local stores to grab better special offers in your location, but in general this is one deliciously awesome service all round.