Cooking.com, a shopping web site mixed with social networking has taken a $7 million loan from ORIX Venture Finance.  Cooking.com started in 1998 and has over 90,000 products for the kitchen with 10,000 recipes.  The community is for cooks and other food lovers.  The founders of Cooking.com are former employees of The Walt Disney Corporation.

Cooking.com has an office in Santa Monica and Ontario, California.  Cooking.com’s team of web developers have created e-commerce sites for Betty Crocker and Starbucks.  The loan will be made to expand their services.  TechCrunch & VentureBeat reports that the company has previously raised $88 million from IdeaLab, Pyramid Technology Fund, and Hikari Tsushin.

Cooking.com has a wedding registry and also has free newsletters.   And what does a site that survived the dot-com bust have to carry with it?  Old school forums!