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Category Archives: Article
Where Things Stand
February 3, 2011 – 11:57 am
The past few weeks haven’t seen a lot of visible action on Fridge to Food. There are a couple of reasons for this. I have been working on Fridge to Food’s little sister — Farm to Fridge — and at the same time working to give Fridge to Food a facelift. I’ve gotten a number of comments from people that the current design is not intuitive. I’ve also gotten comments to the effect that the dark color scheme is oppressive or depressing. So I’m working to remedy both of those issues.
The problem is, I’m not a designer. I’m a developer through and through. I can make things work and I’m very good at it. But making things look good? So. Very. Not my area of expertise. The design you see before you today was the result of a long and slow iterative process. During which I would make a design and say “How’s this?” And people would respond “Meh…” Then I’d do it again and say “How about this?” And they would respond “A little better.” So on and so forth until I landed here. Clearly, that process is continuing.
In the course of it, I think I wandered away from my original intention for the site. Originally, I’d wanted something very clean. With out a lot of extra flash and shine. I’d wanted the focus on the recipes and the images. I was trying to build a TasteSpotting++. So, with this new recent redesign I’ve tried to move back to that idea. The problem is, I still have all these extra features that I want to use. That whole “++” part. And I don’t know where to put them with out ruining the clean and not flashy asthetic of the site. But also make them intuitive and easy to use.
I might be in over my head with this one. Luckily, I’ve got the help of a couple of awesome people. Hopefully, with their feedback, I can find my way to the surface.
Food, Family and Crazy
December 1, 2010 – 3:44 pm
Thanksgiving is, with out a doubt, my favorite holiday. It is so simple and straight forward, a harvest festival in its purest form. Family, good food, good drink, good fun and being thankful. This thanksgiving I spent in Las Vegas as a stepping stone on my trip home from Thailand. I spent it with my mother’s side of the extended family — Italian, Jewish and from New York, Long Island and New Jersey. You can imagine what it was like. Loud, raucous and great fun! Of course, only in small doses. I think by the end of it, all fourteen of us had overdosed on each other. But never mind that, Thanksgiving Day itself was wonderful. And the food, oh the food!
The Pan Baked out of Bird Stuffing
The Mashed Potatoes
The Mushrooms and Onions
The Green Beans
The Turkey
The Carcass
Happy belated Thanksgiving everyone!
Support Your Favorite Restaurant: Reserve a Table the Old Fashioned Way
November 23, 2010 – 6:24 pm
If you eat out a lot and are tech literate, you’ve probably heard of a service called Open Table. In fact, chances are you use that service to make restaurant reservations when you go out to eat. On the face of it, it seems like a brilliant idea. You don’t have to call the restaurant, you can just turn on your smart phone or go to opentable.com to make a reservation. It’s easy, straight forward and fast. And it’s free!
Well, it’s free to you. But it isn’t free to the restaurant. In fact, it’s very expensive for the restaurant — to the point of being harmful.
Most restaurants run very thin profit margins. The average marginal profit for a full service restaurant in the United States is about 5%. That means that if you go to a restaurant and have a $50 meal, the restaurant makes $2.50.
Open Table charges restaurants for its service. That’s why it can offer it to us — the consumers — free of charge. There are startup fees for software installation. There is a monthly subscription fee. And finally there is a charge of $1 per diner who books through opentable.com or the mobile app and $0.25 per diner who books through the restaurant’s own website. A recent study of the Open Table fee structure discovered that when you take into account the start up costs, the monthly subscription fee and the average number of tables Open Table actually fills for restaurants, the actual average cost per diner is more like $2.60.
That means that if you book through Open Table and eat a $50 meal, the restaurant doesn’t make any money from you. Zero. All of the profits go straight to Open Table. If you eat a substantially cheaper meal, it’s possible the restaurant could actually lose money from your visit.
So why on Earth do restaurants agree to this? Why do so many use Open Table? Well, because of us. Their customers who use Open Table. Because we don’t want to make that phone call. We pressure them. So much so, that some of the restaurants that don’t use it feel the need to explain themselves.
They’re afraid that if they don’t use Open Table, they’ll lose our business. Even though they don’t gain anything from our business when we book with Open Table. They hope and pray that next time we come, we won’t book using Open Table and they’ll actually be able to make some money. But more often than not we don’t. We book on Open Table, every time.
So what can you do? You can help out the restaurants who’s food you love by making a reservation the old fashioned way — calling! And you can spread the word to your friends who use Open Table — when you book with Open Table the restaurant loses.
Name that Ribbon
November 12, 2010 – 4:26 am
Ribbons are part of the game nature of Fridge to Food. They are little prizes that are intended to reward and encourage participation in the site in certain ways. The current ribbons encourage voting and posting recipes. The rainbow ribbons are intended to be earned as a matter of course if you’re fully participating in Fridge to Food. The white ones require some dedicated participation, but should be pretty achievable if you’re moderately active. The red ones are supposed to be pretty hard to come by and take some serious dedication. And the blue ones are intended to be rare and hard to get. They are all meant to be worn as badges of honor. They show that the foodie who has earned them has contributed in a serious way to the Fridge to Food community.
This batch covered adding recipes, voting on recipes and having your recipes voted on. I have a bunch more in mind, but I need help naming them. The photography ones especially, I’m having trouble with. I’m the first to admit I know little to nothing about photography. The ones I have in mind play out like this.
First there are the ribbons for adding photographs:
- white: added photographs to 25 recipes not posted by you
- red: added photographs to 100 recipes not posted by you
- blue: added photographs to 400 recipes not posted by you
Then there are the ones for having your photographs voted on:
- white: photograph with 10 upvotes
- red: photograph with 25 upvotes
- blue: photograph with 100 upvotes
I am at a complete loss for names of these ribbons. Anyone have any ideas? Also, any one have ideas for ribbons that they might like to see on Fridge to Food?
Recipe Roundup
September 27, 2010 – 10:54 am
As part of my job as founder of a new recipe sharing website, I’ve been scouring the food blogs of the web for delicious looking recipe creators. My goals are many fold. I’m hoping to recruit them to found Fridge to Food‘s nascent community of cooks. I want to learn what their perfect recipe site would look like. And I want to learn from them about that which they do best.
Oh boy is there a lot to learn from them! To share what I have begun to learn I’m going to begin doing recipe round ups and direct you to their delicious creations. I would like to say that I will be doing weekly recipe roundups, but my life is far too tumultuous for that right now. So it will simply be periodical recipe roundups.
This roundup includes a number of my favorites from the last week or so from around the web.
First up Chicken and Mushroom Fettuccine… in a crockpot?! Apparently it can be done, and it looks pretty darn good. Furthermore it was cooked up (…hello there random bad pun…) by a 10 year old!
Okay, not a recipe, but I felt this needed to be shared. Having done the gluten-free diet with Michelle for a while, I recall having experiences very similar to Miss Dropsies’ Happy Encounters with servers who understand gluten allergies!
Finally, one of my favorite quick dinners found its way onto Simply Life: Artichoke, Sundried Tomato and Pesto Pizza! This particular recipe looks particularly good. Yum.
Okay, so the first one is going to be a short one. It’s getting late, and Michelle deserves more of my time than she’s gotten tonight.
’till next time, happy eats!
Dan