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Wouldn't it be better to have an actual articles module such as WF-Sections for the recipes? Would also allow your visitors to rate each recipe.
If you are set on wanting the News module to do both, I can recommend
News 1.2 RC2 in which are two blocks - Recent News and Top News - which are basically the same, except for one sorting by publish date and the other by reads. This can be changed when editing the block's settings and you can restrict the block to only take stories from one or more topics. That way you can have one block with your normal announcements and another with recipes.
However, they will both be displayed on the front page, but this will be changed in later versions.