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Cooking with the Internet?
VonGuard asks: "Not all of you live on ramen and coffee. At some point, you have to cook, and the Internet should be a great place to find recipes. Is there a Google for recipes. And why isn't there a larger open cookbook on the net? So, is anyone working on this, or is there something the rest of us don't know about yet?"
I'd try Allrecipes.com. I've gotten some good recipes from there.
You mentioned Google, so why not use it?
Here is the first result, just to get you started : Allrecipes index of 23,000 recipes.
Oh, come on now. Recipes were one of the first things I ever saw posted on the Internet even back when it was Arpanet. In fact, one of the reasons Xerox PARC gave for developing the GUI was to allow everyone to interact with a computer, even "kitchen wives" could be able to easily store and retrieve recipes on a computer without having to use "arcane" symbology.
To answer your question though, I think this link should be more than Slashdot worthy. The show is great, sufficiently geeky, and life is simply too short not to eat.....Good Eats.
There are many, many other links to recipes on the Internet. Food Network is one and Epicurious are the other principle resources I use.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I'm not sure a central repository is all that necessary. It's relatively easy to find five variations on whatever I want to cook, from which I can place a pretty educated guess as to which recipe I would rather use. (Based on ingredients, obvious "convenience substitutions", etc.) It's really a fascinating practice: looking at five different recipes, seeing their similarities and differences, learning the central core theme to the composition, and seeing where different cooks have developed their own riffs.
(I guess I'm saying that if you want a large collection of standard recipes, go buy your requisite copy of the Joy of Cooking. Otherwise, embrace heterogeneity.)
I really haven't explained why a central Google/Open/Wiki cookbook would work against this. I just think that once people saw a recipe had been submitted, they would be less inclined to upload their slightly different version. Maybe such a global project would benefit by somehow encouraging the submission of many varieties, including a "moderation system" by which culinary enthusiasts might edit the variations-on-a-theme and even write editorials on how and why the variations exist, which provide useful time-saving substitutions, when a certain ingredient of method is really necessary to make the "Real McCoy", etc.
Another thing worth mentioning: there are already dozens of "cooking sites" that provide this service, most of them are very "open" allowing easy submission and access. I think a big Open Initiative is successful when there AREN'T pre-existing sites providing a service, or when the sites try to restrict access by forcing a paid subscription model. (Like Wikipedia to online Encyclopedias.) The addition of some generic Open cooking site would become "just another cooking site".
A funny side-note. I've benefitted by the LACK of such a central source. I have a website that I've been cultivating for under a year, where I've put creative (written, artistic, photographic, computing, etc.) works. I've done everything possible to cultivate this site so that visitors would come to it. The thing that brings the most visitors to my site? My "Basic Crepe Recipe". For some funny reason nobody else in the world has a higher Google-ranked Basic Crepe Recipe. (Okay, recently I got knocked down to #2.) So this little "afterthought" has become a leading constant influx of visitors.
Murray Todd Williams
Forgot the link somehow...
Foot Network
I'm surprised that I haven't seen the Wikibooks-Cookbook at http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook
The BBC has a very good food section that, in addition to having info on cooking shows and celebrity chefs, allows you to search its extensive collection of recipes - both from shows and submitted by readers. Also, they publish a magazine called Good Food from which (no doubt) many of these recipes are taken.
John
-- "...I'm a bad guy because I, well, I sing some rock-and-roll songs." M. Manson
Epicurious is, by far, the best site for recipes on the web. The best feature is its archive of recipes from a variety of publications going back many years.
That's a standard Urban Legend, though it's more often a cookie recipe. Check out Snopes for the details.
And for those disinclined to click links, a summary:
Actually this is right.
Try this for chicken, or this for beef, and so on.
http://www.researchbuzz.org/archives/001404.shtml
Dude, where's my packet?
I've used UCBerkeley's Searchable Online Archive of Recipes for years. Its biggest shortcoming is a lack of ingredient searches, but they've integrated Google into the search for full text search, which is good enough, if a bit clumsy.
Here's the skinny from their About Us page:
While RecipeSource may be one of the newest recipe sites on the Internet, we're also one of the oldest. Our collection was started in 1993 by Jennifer Snider when she discovered the wonders of Usenet newsgroups & Internet mailing lists as a student at the University of California at Berkeley. She started saving recipes posted to those sources and soon amassed thousands of recipes. When her friends found out about the collection, we encouraged her to put them on the web, and she agreed, provided we helped her. After several months of hard work, the recipes first appeared on the web in 1995 as SOAR: The Searchable Online Archive of Recipes. From our start with around 10,000 recipes we've grown the collection to 7 times that size, and had our pages accessed millions of times from around the world. Thanks to our popularity, we've outgrown our original home, so we've moved the collection here to RecipeSource.com, where we hope it will continue to grow, while providing better response time and a better search engine than our old site.
I find Carnegie Mellon's Online Recipe Archive to be a wonderful resource.
I just started working on my own recipe database program. I started with a perl/mysql/cgi interface and now I'm working on a qt program to interface said database.
r ecipezaar.com// /www.foodtv.com/
Granted all my recipes are family recipes and it's nowhere near ready for mass consumption but there are recipes everywhere. allrecipes.com has already been mentioned but there are some other good sites:
http://www.recipesource.com/
http://www.
http://eat.epicurious.com/
http:
Of course if you are looking for something google can be your best resource.
Hopefully I will eventually have something that I feel is good enough to release. While I am using mysql, since I am using dbi (for the perl end) and qt for the c++ end it should be able to use any database that these support with just a recompile. Let me know if there is really an interest in this and I could try and release something soon. I'd give my web site but it's on my cablemodem which I'm not supposed to run a server off of.
The secret is : Shan Foods spice mixes. I found a Pakistani convenience store in my neighborhood in Montreal, and there were these little boxes piled high, with pictures of food on them. Each one is a mix of the spices needed for the dish in question. You just add the meat, yogurt, onions, etc... I've noticed that a lot of the things I end up making like this have the same odor and taste as what I get in restaurants, for a lot less and it's fresher.
There is also the Gits brand, which offers many type of dessert mixes you can prepare easily. I've always liked the fried milk balls, and with a 2$ pouch I can make enough to last for a week.
Then there's the Haldiram's Soan. Oh my God, I can't even describe it. A mix between Halvah and cotton candy, with an exotic flowery aroma? Anyways, at 5$ for a pound of them, you can't go wrong.
Here's the summary of these links below:
http://www.cookbook.com/
http://www.allrecipes.com/
http://www.foodnetwork.com/
http://eat.epicurious.com/
http://recipedelights.com/index6271m.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/
http://www.recipesource.com/
http://www.meals.com/Index/Index.aspx?Theme=0
http://www.altonbrown.com/
BTW I did this for me so I can look them up easier! Thanks for the links everyone.
Victorian classics:
Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management
Moxon's English Housewifery Exemplified
Two interesting early vegetarian cook-books:
The Healthy Life Cook-Book
The Reform Cookery Book
Of historical interest:
The Form Of Cury -- in Middle English.
This is just a sample -- there are many more (search Gutenberg.net for 'cook' or 'cookery').
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Sounds like you could do a mushroom-noodle stirfry that wouldn't be too bad. Or course, there aren't too many permutations with 3 ingredients - just in the methods of cooking...
you could make a "salad" with crunched up ramen (I'm assuming you're using dry?) and sliced mushrooms, and use the hoisin sauce as a dressing.
Or you could crush the ramen, remove the mushroom stems, and mush it up with some hoisin sauce, and stuff this into the mushrooms and bake them. (a little butter will help).
YOu could make traditional ramen, add sliced mushrooms and flavor with hoisin sauce.
Or put it all a blender add water and ice, and make a mushroom, hoisin, ramen shake. Mmmmmm...
Hoisin is one of those sauces where the way to get the strongest flavor out of it is to heat it a bit before eating.
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The best spot on the web is chef2chef.net. The forums there are populated by both food lovers and professional chefs. Everybody interacts and has a great time, plus exchanges an immense amount of information. You should go!
I'm sorry, but the secret should NEVER be a specific brand of spice blends. Seriously. The secret is probably a spice or spices that are hard to find in american supermarkets, but that doesn't mean you should stick to one name brand of spices.
Sorry, I guess I should explain my paranoia. You see, I have this thought that were I to move, and be uprooted from my network of grocery stores, I may not be able to find the same brands later on. Thus, I feel that I cannot get too attached to brands, and instead need to learn the core essence of cooking and how to make things from scratch.
However, it is true you might be able to find certain ethnic ingredients only at those stores. For example, sichuan peppercorns are now banned for sale in the US (there was a NY Times article on it, technically they're considered a fruit). I cook a LOT of chinese food, sichuan in particular, so I managed to get them from behind the counter thanks to flirting with the girl who works at the local chinese supermarket (where they speak next to no english).
You'd be surprised what you can find at these 'hole in the wall' ethnic places.
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