Until recently, both Bon Appetit and its Conde Nast sibling, Gourmet, shared online space via epicurious.com, perhaps the most well-known recipe portal on the Web.

Now they are distinctive Web entities (well, sort of) with their own domains, (bonappetit.com and gourmet.com), look and feel, offering up both re-purposed magazine content and online-exclusive multimedia wizardry.

This does not mean epicurious.com has disappeared into the Internet sunset; in fact, it seems to be developing a personality of its own. You can find both BA and Gourmet from epicurious, and what I discovered along the way is one of the coolest Web food features I've seen in a long time.

Someone rather brilliant at epicurious.com has produced a Peak-Season Map, an amazing interactive tool that provides month-by-month produce updates for all 50 states. Here's how it works: You click on a month, then you click on a state, and you get a handy-dandy pop-up list of in-season crops. Each ingredient page includes links to backgrounders as well as recipe archives. This is the smartest thing I've seen on the Web in a long time -- hooray!