I bet you’ve done this: get online, log onto Allrecipes, scroll through some recipes. First, you were looking for a specific recipe. Then you saw a link to another recipe. Then you linked to another. Soon, you’re looking at recipes for the best pimento cheese spread, pork chops from Venezuela, and award-winning barbecue sauce. Then your sig-other come in and says, “did you decide what to make for dinner?” Oops. More time lost exploring Allrecipes’ databases.

Well, have you ever wondered about the database and how it stays up there? Who populates it, and who organizes it? Richard Kozel and his team does. I met Kozel at the Allrecipes “What’s Cooking” premier, and he took a few minutes to chat with me.

Kozel has a Master’s degree in library science, and that’s a good thing. His team maintains, organizes, sorts, and tracks thousands of recipes on the number-one online recipe database. He makes sure that word searches, links, and databases provide on-topic, relevant, useful information. He likes to read reviews to recipes, not to correct them, but to make sure they apply to the recipe.

At home, Kozel is an avid cook. He even maintains his own Allrecipes account. He has worked in restaurants, so he finally gets to pair his passion for food with his talents in database and information storage. Cooking, he says, “is never not fun.”

What keeps him in Seattle, besides Allrecipes? The city is so vegetarian friendly. He says there are lots of options here, from Thai to Ethiopian and to the Dahlia Lounge.

“Try the handmade vegetarian pasta. It’s creamy and delicious,” he says about Dahlia Lounge. Okay, maybe I will.

Allrecipes staff is remarkably like us. Full of food lovers and home cooks.