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Category Archives: Article
What is the dream food site?
September 26, 2010 – 10:51 am
What does the perfect food site do? My dream was a site that focused on the recipes. That had an image – at least one, preferable a whole bunch – to go with every recipe. I want to be able to browse food the way we were meant to — as much as possible over the internet. I wanted a site where I could simply say “Yay” or “Nay” to a recipe and see how many other people had reacted similarly. I wanted to be able to search by ingredients or by titles and see only recipes that were vegetarian or gluten-free. I wanted the whole thing to be community operated. And I wanted the best chefs and cooks to be visibly rewarded.
In a perfect world I want to be able to click on an ingredient and get a list of farms or farmer’s markets nearby where I could find said ingredient. Local sources for great food.
Fridge to Food isn’t there yet, but it is on its way to becoming my dream recipe site. It has an infant community and the beginnings of many of the things I wanted to see. So what is your dream recipe site? What does it have? What does it allow you to do? Does it match my dream?
Recipes Galore!
September 8, 2010 – 9:52 am
This week, I began importing recipes from Recipes Wiki under the username Recipes Wiki. I have to admit, I’m feeling more than a little ambivalent about this. It’s well with in the terms of the Creative Commons license. Indeed, its part of the whole point of the license – putting stuff out there for anyone to use. Fridge to Food isn’t commercial yet. If and when it goes commercial it’ll only be because my meager salary can no longer support it. I created a user specifically for Recipes Wiki, where I link to the wiki. Every recipe cites the page in the wiki from which it came – which is the only citation required by the license. I make sure in the bio of the Recipes Wiki user to say that the bloggers originating the wikis recipes may claim their recipes when they make an account of their own (and if they so choose, delete them).
But even all of that said, I still feel sort of slimy doing this. No one gave me explicit permission. Sure it’s implicit in the license and the goal of the site, but no one told me “You can do this.” And that gives me pause. I’m sure there are people in the Recipes Wiki community who would not approve of what I’m doing. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure most wouldn’t care and others would heartily approve.
What it came down to was this. I created Fridge to Food because it was a tool that I wanted to be able to use. I can’t use it if there aren’t recipes in it. Recipes Wiki is a source of 40,000 recipes I could (with implicit permission and legal permission) add to this tool. And in adding them to the tool, I will be spreading them to the world and making them more available to others who want to find them. I still feel ambivalent about it. Its the sort of ambivalence you feel when you’re doing something you want to do, but aren’t completely comfortable doing.
Happily, I’ve been able to pause adding them since I began the project. Marie Alice of A Year from Oak Cottage and The English Kitchen joined Fridge to Food and gave me permission to add her 400+ recipes from The English Kitchen! Thank you Marie Alice!! But man do I have my work cut out for me. So far I’ve gotten through 17 over the past two nights. I think I can maintain a pace of between 10-20 a night. At that rate, it’ll take me nearly a month to add all of hers. But we will have quintupled the size of Fridge to Food’s database in the process. Any they look scrumptious.
One of the upshots to my having to add all these recipes by hand is that I’m getting to take a good, hard look at the recipe adding pages. Its giving me an excellent chance to figure out how they can be improved and what features I need to add to them. So far I’ve determined that I need to be able to give recipes sub-sections (for the dressing, for the salad), allow the poster to rearrange the ingredients and add a notes and description section. Also, I’m considering splitting preparation and amount (something I had originally done and decided to change).
This week is the last week of classes, next week we’re just invigilating final exams. Is invigilating a word of British origin? In the states we say you Proctor an exam. Either way, I’ll just be sitting in classrooms keeping a wary eye on the students. The two weeks after that I’ll be grading and preparing for the next semester. And then it’s break. So I’ll have plenty of time in the coming month to work on the code and add recipes.
By the way, if you like the site and want to help it grow, a shout out or a link on your blog is a very effective way to do that. And I’d be most grateful! As always, any feedback you have on it is most welcome. You can e-mail it to me, if you’d rather give it in private, at dbingham@fridgetofood.com. Or you can just post it to the feedback page 
Cooking in Thai
September 5, 2010 – 10:43 pm
Living in Thailand has been an interesting experience from the stand point of cooking. The ingredients available here and the way they cook are completely different from back home in the states. Apartments here rarely come with ovens. Ovens simply aren’t used. In fact, it’s rare for an apartment here to come with a kitchen! Eating out is so cheap and any many people just choose to eat from vendors. Our current apartment has only a tiny kitchenette. Barely worthy of the designation “kitchen”. It has a sink.
We (my girlfriend Michelle and I) have added an electric hot plate to it, in order to try and actually use it. But one electric hot plate does not a kitchen make. Still with a little creativity we’ve been able to make the best of it.
Homemade Fresh Tomato Sauce over Rice
The recipe to the left was produced on our little electric hotplate. Fresh tomato sauce with Tofu, straw mushrooms, scallions and Thai basil over wild rice. It was actually quite delicious. Not bad for a hot plate and one pot. We had to cook the rice before the tomato sauce and set it aside in a small container. It was cool by the time the sauce was finished nearly forty-five minutes later, but the sauce heated it right back up.
The tomatoes came from the downtown market in Phuket Town. In leaving Saratoga Springs I left behind a thriving local food culture and wonderful farmer’s market in which I had many friends. In particular the Argyle Cheese Farmer (Dave and Marge) who’s yogurt, cheeses and weekly chats I miss dearly. But in arriving in Phuket I discovered that the local market is a farmer’s market. And it runs all day and all night every day. There is a constant stream of fresh produce entering it. Delicious fresh tomatoes, fresh Thai basil in giant bunches, scallions, cabbage, chilis of more varieties than I knew existed, more fruit than I thought possible, and many vegetables I don’t even know the name of of. And occasionally I find surprises. The other day, I discovered fresh asparagus there! I thought asparagus grew only in spring, that it needed a winter. But apparently someone here has found a way to grow it. Unbelievable.
All that said there are many things conspicuously absent from it. There are no dairy products of any kind. No fresh milk, no yogurt or cheese, no ice cream. None. Nor are there honey, wine or preserves. I mostly miss the dairy. I’m a dairy fiend. I love a cup of fresh whole milk. I devoured Marge and Dave’s yogurt by the quart. And their cheeses… a block would rarely last the day I bought it. Not having dairy products available here breaks my heart. I can find nearly spoiled UHT milk in the 7-elevens here, but that’s about it.
Chicken Green Curry
But not all is lost. When you lose some, you usually win some. Never would I have found the extent or deliciousness of curries back home in Saratoga that I find in the market here. They sell them from gigantic piles of the pastes. They scoop large portions into backs and the portions cost less than a dollar. The one problem is they are hot as hell. So I have to limit my use of them. But when they are mixed with fresh coconut milk and cream – straight from the coconut – delicious is the only possible word for it.
That’s exactly what this Chicken Green Curry is. Michelle and I made this when we took a cooking class here with Pat. She was a bit out of sorts that morning, as the previous evening had been her husbands birthday and she’d spent the entire previous day cooking and preparing for it. Then she’d spent all night partying. I suspect she was more than a little hung over. None the less, her cooking class was very informative and the foods we made blew me away. This curry was delicious. In making it, she taught us to squeeze the milk and cream from the coconut and to separate the cream from the milk. We then mixed in the green curry paste along with various ingredients (mostly different kinds of eggplant) to produce the final curry. We took it home and served it over our wild rice after reheating it on our hot plate and it was absolutely delicious.
Now that we’ve been paid we can hopefully move to a bigger apartment, maybe even a whole house. There are many places well with in our price range that have a full kitchen! We’re looking and hopefully we find a place. I can’t wait to be able to really make use of that market. What I could do with all those delicious fresh vegetables and fruit in a full kitchen. Oh. Yum.