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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'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
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.
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.
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...