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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. :)"
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
At least it is in my home: How to Brew.
I'd rather than like to see a cooking book from a chemist. These guys knows the difference between concrete and whipped cream.
Achille Talon
Hop!
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.
Steps 2 and 3 look easy enough. ...
I've been working on step 1 for 35 years without much success.
Perhaps it could be factored into a. b. c.
If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it? ~ Albert Einstein
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
Engineers should be weighing their ingredients.
Not measuring by volume.
Especialy with dry good(flour, etc)
To understand the modern recipie you have understand it's history and just what it is it's trying to tell you.
The recipie as we know it comes to us from the French school of cooking. The French follow the practice of preparing all of the ingredients first and then applying process to them.
So the list of ingredients isn't simply a list, it's a list of things to do.
Chop some foo, put it in a bowl. Now take these spices, put them all in another bowl. Dice some bar, put it in a third bowl.
Now apply process 1 to bowl 1, etc.
It's perfectly concise and understandable once you understand the meta instructions.
Frankly I find those diagrams nearly unreadable and representative of what's wrong with most engineering manuals, but then I was raised by women.
KFG
The worst part about it is after he spends a buttload to upgrade his service, things will go back to where they were and he will be paying for way more than needs.
The real question is, why don't the editors do it? Would it take too much time out of his busy, busy day for Michael to add nydu.net:8090 to a posting? If Perl is such a kickin' language, why doesn't Taco make links default to Coral if they are not submitted with it in the first place? That's largely what Coral was set up for - they even mention the /. effect by name on their site.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
So, are you saying that the average joe, who can follow a table recipe instead of a standard recipe, won't make anything that tastes as good as a frozen meal?
I agree that the average person won't make an excellent chef, and that it takes more than a recipe to make excellent food. But to make good food that most people will eat merely takes a recipe and someone who can follow it.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
"Designed for women and their funny way of looking at the world."
What a crock of shite.
OK, first, nearly half of my cookbooks are written by *men*. Highly successful men in their field. I can't find any difference between their books and those written by their female counterparts. I have no trouble at all understanding these instructions, nor do I have any trouble with adjusting them to my own tastes.
This isn't about male/female, it's about whether you ever learned to cook. It certainly isn't rocket-science, though I'll admit that some things require a LOT of skill and patience. Making puff-pastry requires a very skillfull hand, and 1-2 days. But this is no different than experience and learning being the difference between "hello world" and being able to code a polygon shading algorithm.
There are a lot of things around that remind me that women have different viewpoints on things than men, but cookbooks aren't on that list.
That's why God invented soups and stews. You make one huge pot of something that you can eat out of at will during the week. Keep "evolving" it for variety. What starts out on Sunday as a couple gallons of lentil soup ends up as a few bowls of lentil and potato curry by Thursday.
The entire art of homemade "convienience" foods seems to have died out, in fact the two are often considered antithetical, but the microwave oven makes them an more valid than ever.
Rice and bean dishes are also excellent for cooking in bulk.
Then when she wants to eat at 6, but you want to cook until 9, you can prepare her (or she can help herself) a quicky mini-meal with a cup of hot chocolate (or wine if her taste turns in that direction), and you're free to cook until the contentment of that wears off.
KFG
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.