Slashdot Mirror
Cooking for Engineers
gbjbaanb writes "It's not often I post about a website, but this one is different. It is Cooking For Engineers. No big deal, you'd think - a web site about recipes and cooking. But go look at how he's presented it. Most recipes are designed for women, and their funny way of looking at the world. These are very different and instantly understandable for tech geeks like us. Oh yes, although he's been affected by firefox, he blames Microsoft. :)"
post on the blog), the basic idea here is a the ingredients shown in an html table with the
directions to whisk/boil/mash/etc in merged columns to the right of the ingredient column.
Google cache shows the idea for his BBQ sauce recipe.
--H
Also read: The Science of Cooking by Peter Barham
Those charts are genious.
I can't count the number of times I've gotten lost following a recipe in a real cook book, but these things take a lot less time to read, and look like they'd be a lot easier to follow throughout the process.
Plus, they're a lot more compact than a written-out recipe. That means I can fit more of them in my recipe bo...
aw, who am I kidding?
I thought there was already a Patron Saint chef of geeks... Alton Brown!
How about creating an XML namespace for this format...
That could be fun....
Ted Tschopp
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
That's a great way of presenting all the steps in the process. Whenever I cook, I always assume that the long step is always the last one (Bake for 90 minutes, simmer for 30 minutes, etc). I've had to order out for chineese many times when trying new receipies because step 4 of 12 is something like "Marinate for 29 hours", and you know, I didn't really bother to read past the list of ingredients. I just figure that if I don't have to shop for it, I can cook it that day.
1. Find a woman who can tolerate you.
2. Enter the kitchen with her.
3. Do whatever she says.
Actually, if you leave out step 2 the other steps nearly always apply.
~~~
In a standard recipe, ingredients are listed in the order in which you use them. I don't see what's so peculiar about that that makes it "womanly"
If you look at the whole recipes on his site, there's still your normail, detailed instructions. I guess it's nice having a quick synopsis at-a-glance, but I'm going to carefully read the entire recipe if it's new to me before I even begin mis en place
This is especially true with baking which is much more akin to chemistry than, say, tomato sauce.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Or else he could explain the sudden increase in web hits...maybe someone should tell him (or for that matter he's hosting company) before the servers melt...
At least it is in my home: How to Brew.
THAT is how recipies need to be laid out, with those kinds of charts. SO much frickin' easier to understand.
Technoli
Come on ... "cooking for engineers" ... use Metric for chrissakes.
... no kidding.
...
I once read a recipe : "1 cup banana"
Americans
Now we can eat something other than pizza!
While this is a very geek-friendly format for recipes, most of us with any interest at all in cooking have already learned how to read and follow "normal" recipes, and those with no interest in cooking aren't likely to start just because of an interesting format.
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
As am amateur cook and professional engineer I was very impressed with the layout. I can not tell you how many times I have misread a recipe because I skimmed the English looking for the next step. Last week I skipped 3 hours of a second rise on a bread I already spent 18 hours on, if only I had not missed that step! This layout is simply brilliant, ingredients on the Y, steps/time on the X. It couldn't be more strait forward. Now we just need to get EVERYONE doing this!
this is my sig.
1. Goto store
2. Insert 12, eggs, cart
3. Insert 1lb, butter, cart
4. Mov $5.00, wallet, store_clerk
5. Goto home
6. Mov pan, grill
7. heating = 05
8. Mov 1oz, butter, pan
9. Mov 2, eggs, pan
10. sleep (1000)
11. Mov product, oral_cavity
12. end
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Here's the Coral P2P Webcache of the Main page and a example recipe
Note: Cache includes images (vs google link posted above).
PS: somebody wrote a javascript bookmarklet that'll take you to the coral cache of the page you are on. There's also a offical Coralize plugin for Mozilla
.sig
perhaps this might help him
courtesy of the Coral Distribution Network
http://www.cookingforengineers.com.nyud.net:8090/
save his bandwidth and use that
...apparently isnt aware he is slashdotted....
I found the layout of the recipe very nice, but it just doesn't scale if the steps are particularly complex -- look at how creme brulee was described if you don't believe me. However, something very similar that does scale is the latex style cooking by Axel Reichert (CTAN link: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contr ib/cooking/)
The essential difference is that instead of nesting columns, Axel's style uses only two columns which enables the second column to be very large if necessary. Though I've got to admit that for simple recipies, the cooking for engineer's site looks very good.
PS: Cooking is a great way to unwind after spending all day coding, especially if you don't mind the meal taking a few hours (and glasses of wine) to prepare...
Apart from "very nice" I can't think of much to say, so I'll just make a convenient nyud link - The guy's used up his month's traffic in one weekend, so he'd probably appreciate some mirroring :)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Very good site...very geeky guy...very kewl recipes.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Open Source Cookbook
"Microwave Until Hot"
yep, and I'm an engineer too
Cooking Foreigners
Needs more salt.
I didn't know men were illiterate.
"Designed for women and their funny way of looking at the world." I, honestly, can not even think of something remotely humorous to respond to this post. People wonder why we can't get laid? This statement effectively sets us back to the Stone Ages. Cro-Magna Phi Epsilon, represent!
It ain't so funny when you consider the thing you want the most, their uterus, falls under the "funny way of looking at the things" category.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
What's a woman?
everybody knows the jobs got export to india, so how bout they export their food to me! yum!!!
1) Point out that IE is not standards compliant.
2) Submit story.
3) Allow web server to bake until golden brown.
4) Enjoy!
Also try Wikimedia Cookbook. Try the Lembas Bread recipe.
The linked site actually gives a pretty cool way of doing recipes. This comment, however:
Most recipes are designed for women, and their funny way of looking at the world
Is completely uncalled for. What part of
Name of Food
Ingredients
Instructions
is in any way some sort of "funny way of looking at the world"? It's not like there aren't plenty of male cooks, either. Way to be sexist, Slashdot.
Visit the
cooking is an art not a science.
Engineers should be weighing their ingredients.
Not measuring by volume.
Especialy with dry good(flour, etc)
Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of Cooking" is 704 pages of microbiology, chemistry, history and how-tos. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684 843285/qid=1094868483/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-447084 1-5835037?v=glance&s=books
Great read, lots of science and if you cook, makes some mysteries of the kitchen less mysterious.
4. ?????????
5. Profit!
Cogito, ergo sig.
Are you afraid your mom will see what you wrote?
Pussy.
I can't go on any further.
Unless you Americans have been doing something (else) strange to the English language, the word is spelt 'recipe,' not 'recipie.'
Of course, it may be the non-Americans committing this travesty, so I'll stop before I get flamed back.
Cogito, ergo sig.
My frustration is how he expresses the problem with CSS:
I find that interpretation frustrating.
What is unfortunate is not that a standards compliant browser would properly display IE's mangled HTML/CSS- it's that we have to mangle it for IE in the first place.
I wish more designers would design for the standards-compliant browsers first. Add a ie-kludge.css import every time you detect IE if necessary.
Anyhow... I hope the guy does well. You can't be too upset at a guy's CSS if he has a nice recipe explanation for making Tiramisu on his front page.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
I always thought that cooking involved various types of physical/chemical reactions taking place within organic substances that, when combined properly, stimulated human tastebuds in a pleasurable manner (with some deviation among test subjects -- I don't like mustard, myself).
Why can't cooking be a combination of art and science?
And it sure beats debugging the pizza that should have been put in the fridge last night.
Cogito, ergo sig.
I am going to print out some of these recipes. I think it will be funny watching my wife try to figure out what the heck it means. I give it 10 minutes until she rips it up and gets out the cook book.
And that 10 minutes will be the funniest thing ever. And the following month I will be one very lonely husband...with some extra time to kill in the evenings if you know what I mean.
About 20 years ago some of my friends put together a pseudo-code program that described how to enjoy beer. It included variables (who brought, who paid, who got to take the empties back), subroutines to fill the cooler when the queue hit the low-water mark, and even non-maskable interrupts (when nature calls).
I'll stick with Ramen noodles.
When a website ONLY works in IE and when the author most change it for Firefox, why is Firefox blamed?
Cooking For Engineers Volume 2: How To Use Your Smoking Slashdotted Server to Cook Delicious Meals in Three Easy Steps!
Hard work pays off tomorrow, but procrastination pays off NOW!
Cooking Engineers....
Cooking *For* Engineers....
Cooking *Forty* Engineers....
Cooking *For* Forty Engineers....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The site sucks. Honest opinion. Not a troll.
The videos are in Real format, just in case you were wondering.
However, the same basic concepts are there; gathering all the ingredients, an order of operations, and times/temperatures, and I think this alternative might make a lot mor epeople like to cook, and that's great!!
Developers: [should be] Cooking for Engineers
I like his reciepe's although with my weight last thing i need is to be cooking more. His layout makes sense to me very similar to N/S diagrams.
It is refreshing to see a webpage developer that wants to serve his pages in a standards compliant way instead of an IE complient way.
Stating the obvious it appears to be a microsoft policy to break open standards when ever possible so the only certain way to be sure of no annoying problems is to use the microsoft product.
For once on this site, It's IE that is the exception and hopefully more webpage developers will start realising that content needs to be written to the open standards not microsoft standards.
For Firefox and other standards complient browsers to succeed there needs to be an opensource standards compliant page editor.
Too many sites are written using Frontpage which produces broken html and I still don't know of a free alternative that will produce compliant pages.
I hope some one will reply with a +5 informative post recomending such a program. I think we are winning with firefox; now we need to make life easy for people to produce compliant pages.
I want my freedom of choice back and I am sick of Microsoft doing all it can to make it difficult for me to choose anything other than Microsoft. Micosoft isn't the only company doing this, and I dislike these companies just as much.
Open standards are for everyone to be able to use the best solution they can afford. I have far more respect for a company prepared to support an open standard than one which trys all it can to lock me into their solution because no matter how soft the handcuffs I will always want my freedom.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Don't worry. Traffic will disappear as soon as /. article that have caused it goes off the :-)
the
front page.
Oddly enough, I use a very similar approach to diagramming the steps when I copy a recipe down. Ingedients grouped by when they are combined with each other, with the groupings indicated by brackets that are labeled with how they're combined. I usually write down notes at the bottom expounding any necessary details.
Started doing it that way when I was working on a recipe for vindaloo. The combination of spices is quite extensive, and not all of them are combined at the same time, so I ended up going with the above approach so I could easily figure things out the next time I made it.
Those charts are genious.
They look kinda like Nassi-Schneiderman charts...
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
However the units would be more helpful in decimal metric rather than imperial. He should develp a standard XML format for these things and the charts.
He is pretty interesting to watch. He gets into the science a bit, and he's nutty enough to keep you coming back for more. O
And yes, I see your point where most recipes are designed for the average female and her strange viewpoints.... but I'm definently not your average female.I can totally see the logical set up here and I love it! This website is Awesome. If only all cook books would publish this format, maybe more men would cook :)
My name is a variety of floral rose, and no, it's not blue
Try pair.com, they are very flexible with moving up and down the GB scale; competitive without sacrificing speed and reliability, plus, it will calm down to a more managable scale; I think...
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
Well, I don't get this nonsense about recipes being made for women and their "funny way of looking at the world". It sounds a lot like a comment from somebody who doesn't know much about recipes or women. I've been reading, and successfully following, recipes for much of my adult life. As long as you read all the instructions *before* starting to do anything else, most any well-written recipe is perfectly clear, as long as you have a little bit of domain knowledge (understanding of the basic symbols and terminology, mostly) and the requisite equipment. Pretty much like any other geek task.
I will say that the table layout is a pretty neat idea. I don't personally care for it as much as the traditional format, but that's mainly because I'm used to the "normal" way. The table makes it really clear what steps depend on what other steps. However, there's something to be said for having a linear set of steps - mainly, that you don't get as easily lost in the subtasks and lose track of where you are in the process. I think that might just be me, though.
So what is it about traditional recipes that confuses people?
OT: The "IE-specific tables" look fine in Opera, by the way.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
Sorry... but the first recipie I saw has the first ingredient of "about 20 lady's fingers" for those bi-atches that really pi$$ you off. :D
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Isn't it better practice to use subroutines instead of goto statements?
Of course! If you 'GOSUB HELL', you can eventually RETURN.
Yeah, as posting with a unvetted account is soo much better!
Then I look up a recipe - hmmmm. don't have that. don't have that. don't have that... cook for 3 minutes, per side - or until done.
Gee - I can do that (cook 3 minutes per side).
Add my own butter, garlic, and other stuff I would add anyhow, since I have it
Cook it up. Add some butter, grated cheese de jour, half-n-half... call it alfredo. Pour it over rice or pasta!
viola! (that's french for "ta da") The wife loves it! Get laid.
Oh, damn, I'm I rambling again?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Serious recipes have tolerances. What temperatures are needed, and how tightly do times and temperature have to be controlled? What's the effect of ambient humidity? Here's a oven for a commercial bakery.. 6 heat zones, digital temperature control, and a conveyor belt. The bakery with a unit like that has recipes that tell how to set it up for each product they make. There's no market for a few thousand slightly burnt rolls. Some jobs need a fancy oven like that. Others are less critical. Some jobs (especially pastries) need even finer control.
There are safety issues. See this microorganism lethality calculator. That's a key part of an industrial recipe.
Here are some engineered home recipes. These are intended for use in a programmable home bread-making machine. Note the comments:
- Measure all ingredients exactly -- close is not "good enough".
- Water temperature must be between 70 and 80 degrees Farenheit.
- Use flour specifically designed for bread machines; it rises better than all-purpose flour.
- Load ingredients in the pan in the order listed.
- Keep yeast away from liquids.
Now that's what real engineered recipes look like, tolerances, computer control, and all.Celsius is a metric unit. You'd only need to insist on Kelvin in strict SI.
It's like some half-ass GUI for recipes.
Give me the command-line any day!
Seriously, for a person who can READ, standard recipes are easier to follow. Much, much easier. It's not like recipes are so complicated that you need to use fucking flow-charts.
A book that lays out a good chunk of the chemistry behind cooking (and is required reading at the Culinary Institute of America) is On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee.
I highly recommend it (though who the hell am I?), especially for people who want to know about carmelization, eggs (huge subject there), and milk (another huge subject). And a lot of other stuff.
And very interesting...I looked at the recipe summary, and instantly understood what it was trying to convey. I had my wife look at it (more the artsy non-engineer type) and she got it, but it wasn't as intuitive to her. Good stuff.
lol
The boxed layout could be augmented with cooking/preperation times along the x-axis.
I did write some of my recipes in flowchart-like diagrams. The ingredients were alphabetized, and the blocks were color coded. But then I thought it was just too geeky.
It's clearer than using table-like diagrams. Plus, the advantage is you can try to organize the process such that the timing is right during the (multi-tasking) processes.
Bugzilla notified: 2004-08-25 11:34 Patch provided: 2004-08-25 11:35 If we can bring down the lag a little more we might even be able to provide patches faster than Microsoft can. No mention of this being a root exploit however - just seems to crash the viewer, pretty shoddy that a corrupt file crashes the viewer but to quote from bugzilla - "Not a security issue . . . please use something written this century"
I could've sworn I had several cookery books in the same style (list of ingredients, list of instructions). Strangely, they weren't marketed as "cooking for engineers", rather they tend to be basic cookery books. An example: ISBN: 0140460179. Original edition: 1952 (predates slashdot, and most (99.99%?) of the computer industry).
Given that there are no replies to this topic, I must assume that engineers do not eat.
... It must be open sauce ...
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
Unfortunately, there is no need for engineers to cook anymore. It's been outsourced to India. From now on, we only eat Tandoori chicken.
"Where's my dinner?"
That's what you say when you're married to a woman who can cook.
You hyper-PC people and YOUR funny way of looking at the world, specifically the way that nothing involving race, gender, religion, etc can possibly be funny.
It's a joke, get off it. These sorts of things are amusing precisely because men think that women have a screwed up world view and women think the same thing about men. We often cannot understand eachother's rational given that it is often quite different.
Believe it or not, I DON'T get all offended when a female makes a joke about the sterotypical stupid things men do. I usually find it funny. Just because they lack a penis doesn't mean they can't joke about those that have them and vice versa.
So look, maybe the ultra-PC, over-sensitive routine gets you laid. That's great. Being a complete asshole and treating your women like shit also works really well (on a different kind of woman of course). Doesn't mean either of them is right. Me? Well I'll enjoy humour about the sexes, different races, etc, and I'll take a girl that can as well (they do exist).
I wonder what changed........
Oh but of course! You got slashdotted!
Im [positivelly] surprised he's even online!
Trying to parse your sentence is like trying to read Lisp without a paren-matching editor.
Your sentence is as confusing as Bilbo Baggins' parting speech at his birthday party.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
If this was truly for engineers, it would use metric units and wouldn't mix volume and weight units unnecessarily. Using cups for recipes is ridiculous considering the possible variations in texture and grain size.
You really ought to use a geek language, not a pseudo geek language. Aside from that, I have to admit that in true geek style you left the stove on and burned down the house.
PLEASE IGNORE THE XYs at the beginning of the line; I had to get past the "too few characters" filter.
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY ; GO TO STORE
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY JMP STOR
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY; PUT 12 EGGS in CART (must be a market, no egg carton here!)
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV CX,12
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV [CART],[EGG_SHELF]
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY REPNE
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYX; Put butter in cart, and then pay
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV CX,1
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV [CART],[BUTTER_SHELF]
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY REPNE ; for portability
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV CX,5
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV [REG],[WALLET]
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY REPNE
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY JMP HOME
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYX; put pan on grill, turn on burner
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV [GRILL],PAN_ADDR
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV BX,5
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY OUT [BURNER_LEV],BX
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY; put butter in pan
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV CX,1
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV [PAN_ADDR],BUTTER
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY REPNE
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY; put 2 eggs in pan
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV CX,2
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV [PAN_ADDR],EGG
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY REPNE
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY; Be sure to break eggs!
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY BRK
; we need a speed-independent clock update routine. Code later.
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV CX,[CLOCK]
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY ADD CX,300
XYXYXYXXYXYXYXYXY LP: CMP CX,[CLOCK]
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY JSR UPDATE_CLOCK
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY JNE LP
; TURN OFF BURNER! (you can take shortcuts,
; but be sure it's off at the end of your meal)
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY XOR BX,BX ; BX=0
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV [BURNER_LEV],BX
; Put contents of pan into mouth,
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY MOV [MOUTH],[PAN]
; and now we can return to whatever we were doing.
XYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXYXY RET
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Wow, this site is good.. I admit I'm a really lousy cook, but once I went there, I was hit by so much "duh.." (to good cooks) knowledge that I've decided to check back there every other day =)
If only they have a special section for low fat meals, I think that would appeal greatly to technical people!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
However, what I miss are parametrized recipe algorithms for N persons rather than for a hard-wired N, which would make it much easier to cook for a flexible number of friends invited for dinner.
--
Try Nuggets , the mobile search en gine. We answer your questions via SMS, across the UK.
For many questions like that, http://www.foodsubs.com/ is an invaluable help.
Come on people, lighten up. It was a joke, nothing more. You may not find it funny, you may even think it was in bad taste, but that still doesn't warrant all this griping.
How scary is that...? I guess Slashdot geeks must not cook. Heck, I'll bet I'm the first to even READ this thread at all!!
Cooking is cool, but the trick is -- DON'T follow the recipe. It's like anything else: an ounce of creativity produces a ton of delight. And besides, why make the same thing the same way every time?
Me? I open up the pantry/freezer/fridge/cupboard, take a quick inventory, pull out some stuff that looks like it might be interesting together, and go to work. Simple example:
- frozen chicken breasts (heheh.. he said "breasts")
- bacon
- BBQ or hot sauce of your choice
- and some sausage (summer, polish, whatever).
Wrap the bacon around the chicken (thawed), slice the sausage into bite-size chunks, put all on a cookie sheet (use foil to cover -- less clean-up), pour over the sauce, cook until done. Yummy stuff, and I just made it up one day.
Now, I'm not going to provide any nutritional commentary on the above, or the fat content, or the carbohydrate numbers for you Atkins nuts... but it's good stuff!
They really aren't necessary if you can read, right?
:)
When looking at recipes, I am more concerned with ingredients and talk about technique, not the presentation. Perhaps a bit of history.
For example, his lasagna is very much the "American way", made with ricotta and tomato sauce - Italians don't use ricotta in lasagna - they use a bechamel sauce. The bolognese meat sauce frequently used in Italian lasagne is very unlike the kind you eat in American kitchens.
In others words, I don't see the point in a cookbook made by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about
Given that a cup is a protective device used in certain sports, I'll leave the definition of a cup bananna to your imagination ....
Let me get this straight - he's writing to IE?
If he's not writing to standards, he's NOT an engineer.
Well, now that you've got a cookbook, it's probably time to think about loosing weight - well for most of the slashdot readership anyway. The proper book to do so may be John Walkers The Hacker's Diet: How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition
I've found many people to be somewhat afraid of cooking. Trying a recipe on their own, or helping me (how do I have to cut it? can I put it in now? how long should I stir it?...). I can only recommend to just do it. Maybe it won't be perfect, but as long as you have some endurance it'll work out in the long run. Note that some recipes out there just suck, so it might not be your lack of expertise all the time. If you can, find someone to cook with, preferably with more experience. Cooking is also good for socializing, in case you're interested in that kind of thing ;-).
I have always cooked and baked.
What is so confusing about a recipe, I'll admit I had an interest in cooking and food since about the time I got an interested in LEGO, so maybe I have a bit of experience.
Here is a hint, read the recipe and the instructions, think how you will do it. Then do it, don't do thinking this time, just follow the directions.
I don't think women see the world a different way, they just have a different focus then you might.
Am I the only one that misread that URL? I was expecting a collection of Donald Rumsfeld's favourite recipes.
Some people are engineers AND women.. wonder how they read a recipe..
When will there be cleaningforengineers.com?
...actually read most recipes, and you'll see the difference. For best effect, do it from a magazine like Women's Weekly which is actively targeted at femmes, then compare with his recipes.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
That reminds me of the fabulous Chef programming language, where programs look like recipes.
Here is the "Hello World Souffle" as an example:
Hello World Souffle.
This recipe prints the immortal words "Hello world!", in a basically brute force way. It also makes a lot of food for one person.
Ingredients.
72 g haricot beans
101 eggs
108 g lard
111 cups oil
32 zucchinis
119 ml water
114 g red salmon
100 g dijon mustard
33 potatoes
Method.
Put potatoes into the mixing bowl. Put dijon mustard into the mixing bowl. Put lard into the mixing bowl. Put red salmon into the mixing bowl. Put oil into the mixing bowl. Put water into the mixing bowl. Put zucchinis into the mixing bowl. Put oil into the mixing bowl. Put lard into the mixing bowl. Put lard into the mixing bowl. Put eggs into the mixing bowl. Put haricot beans into the mixing bowl. Liquefy contents of the mixing bowl. Pour contents of the mixing bowl into the baking dish.
Serves 1.
Wait a minute...there's some space dust on this post...aha! Cooking forty engineers!
Also thank you everyone who offered to host my site and also gave suggestions on how to reduce my bandwidth usage.
Thank you, slashdot, for posting those kinds of comments on the front page. As a female engineer I really don't need this first thing in the morning. I am rewriting my hosts file right now.
Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker's "Joy Of Cooking" is as close to a technical manual for cooking as there is, and has been around for quite some time. It covers all the basics of foods and cooking techniques, and even gives some of their history. It's worth having even if you don't cook.
"How to Cook for Forty Humans"
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
Isn't that supposed to be OUR line?
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
I wouldn't consider this site to be more than a cooking-enthusiast's blog with an interesting recipe format. There doesn't seem to be any "engineer"-included aspects or approach to the content IMO.
As a software designer that goofs off with cooking, I think I take a more tech approach. For example, I've started smoking various meats and making my own beef jerky, but I've also been trying dozens of different kinds of woods, some plain, some soaked in different types of liquids and alcohol and researching the ways in which the smoking process with different wood imparts flavor to the food. I've also been working on designing a way to interface an electric smoker to a dehydrator to automate the process of making beef jerky with a true smoky flavor.
I have friends who have designed their own cooking grills and monitoring systems. Those things seem more like an engineers approach to cooking. This site, while interesting, isn't anything special.
Then again, maybe this guy is using an overclocked Pentium as his heating element?
OK. I don't get it. And yes, I am an engineer. A recipe is simply a guide to cooking something (and I don't see how they're designed to be used by one sex or the other) and these charts don't bring any improvement to the party.
If he really wanted to make recipes geek friendly, he could have emphasized that cooking is really just a pattern language: e.g., folding, stirring, beating are all different ways of combining ingredients, but with different results and for different reasons. Or shown that say, bread making and cake making generally follow a series of steps which are altered depending on the type of cake/bread you're making.
People have been cooking for millenia: there's not a lot about it that's difficult. As I said above, recipes are guides: you're expected to be able to vary them depending on your individual circumstances -- you may have eggs much larger than those called out, have a late night whim for cake, but only have bread flour in the house and so on. That's the variability about cooking that makes it fun.
It was Italian Bread. 3 hour sponge + 12 hours in the fridge. then 3 hour proof, which is the part I messed up, I only did one hour.
recipe from Cook's Illustrated Baking book, which I can not recommend enough.
this is my sig.
Engineers should be doing it the easy way.
Most engineers prefer accurate to easy where outcomes are affected.
It's a lot easier to scoop up half a cup of flour and knock it down with a spatula
That cup of flour could easily vary +- 20% by mass depending on your technique, scooping instrument, leveling motion and weather.
than to measure it out on a fucking triple beam balance.
Why would you use a "fucking triple beam balance" when a nice digital Salter scale costs $40 and is push-button easy?
Anyhow, do YOU have a copy of Joy of Cooking where everything is measured by weight? I sure don't. (I do have a copy of Joy of Cooking, though. Annotated by my everlovin' ma.)
No doubt dual-mode skills will be in demand for the forseeable future, but already most European and Asian recipes are based on mass. I tried converting some of the recipes from my dim-sum cookbook before giving up and doing it the right way.
Liquid measure is even easier in metric - instead of a 'scant 7/8 cup' or 'one cup plus 1 1/2 t' you'll be told to do 420ml or whatever the right number is.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How scary is that...? I guess Slashdot geeks must not cook. Heck, I'll bet I'm the first to even READ this thread at all!!
It's about time you upgraded to at least a 28.8 modem...
Do you think the things you say are cute?
Do you think we care?
Don't try to change me, woman. I'm my own man.
I will not groom my beard. I will not comb my hair. If it does not smell funky, I will wear it. If it does smell funky, I will spray it down with frebreeze, and then I will wear it.
I will not conform to your oppressive standards.
Male or female, anyone who asks what you imply one ought to of another, is a jerk. That's right. Not a bitch. A jerk. As far as human beings go, and I'd like to believe that's what we all are here, you are a jerk.
If I have to change my behavior, my goals, my pursuits, and my values to enjoy the companianship of any person, he or she is a person whose companianship I neither need nor desire.
And yes, lass, that is why you are having a difficult time with the gentlemen.
Just a thought from a human being...