Cooking for Engineers 432
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. :)"
Poor guy... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Poor guy... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hope the site is still up in a month, and that I'll still remember to look at it by then.
Re:Poor guy... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Poor guy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hopefully, someone who knows a bit more about this matter will hop in the thread and explain it all.
Re:Poor guy... (Score:5, Interesting)
A coral cache isn't for use for every link you post - it is a perfect tool for links from sites which act as a lens, focusing a ton of traffic (such as slashdot, memepool, etc), much like the flash crowds in Niven novels. Low traffic sites such as my personal sites will never need to reference third party sites via a coral link, but then I get so little traffic that a link from my site is not going to even be noticed, let alone cause problems to any third party. Such is not the case with slashdot.
Fine, don't use coral for a link to Amazon, or IBM. But use some judgement - it would be nice to be able to still visit the smaller (personal) sites and actually read the stories more than 1 minute after the site hits the main page. The smaller tech company site announcements about new products would likely appreciate avoiding a slashdotting.
Also, Coral lists the IPs and hostnames [nyu.edu] of all of their servers, and updates a page every five minutes - if you were really obsessive about your stats, you could flag coral servers, and write a script to pull them from your Apache logs. If you saw them every five minutes, you could then safely assume that someone was saving your site from a hammering.
You are truly paranoid, though. Coral [nyu.edu] is a university research project, hosted by volunteer mirrors. Apart from the fact that there are no hidden agendas or nefarious motives behind Coral, I doubt that the traffic stats for a flash crowd are very meaningful or marketable given the breadth of content covered over a month (mile wide, inch deep). For the revenues from the type of info Coral could collect, I doubt that it would even be worth the costs of setting up the hardware for caching servers, let alone writing the software and paying the bandwidth charges and staff time.
Coral Cache (Score:5, Informative)
perhaps this might help him
courtesy of the Coral Distribution Network [nyu.edu]
http://www.cookingforengineers.com.nyud.net:8090/ [nyud.net]
save his bandwidth and use that
Re:Poor guy... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Poor guy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Basic idea (Score:2, Informative)
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. [64.233.167.104]
--H
Re:Basic idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Another book previously mentioned on /. (Score:3, Interesting)
Charts (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:Charts (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Charts (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather than like to see a cooking book from a chemist. These guys knows the difference between concrete and whipped cream.
Re:Charts (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Charts (Score:5, Interesting)
All this to say this engineering book about cooking is just a cook book about cooking and not real science.
Re:Charts (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that would be Hervé This, who publishes a monthly scientific cooking column in the French edition of Scientific American [pourlascience.com]. Pretty nice guy too.
That's 65C. The white cooks at 64 and the yolk at 66. You want to keep the yolk raw because that's where the taste is (like when you do a zabaione/sabayon and cook the white because it's gelatinous. But you need an advanced oven for that.
Re:Charts (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Charts (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to make Chinese food, try getting some of the recipe books by Weichuan, the Taiwanese food company. I have one of their books from the 1980s or so, which uses a nice format of grouping ingredients.
Re:VisalC++, good? (Score:3, Interesting)
Those charts are genious.
They look kinda like Nassi-Schneiderman charts [smartdraw.com]...
Alton Brown... Is that you? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Alton Brown... Is that you? (Score:3)
Re:Alton Brown... Is that you? (Score:3, Insightful)
Truthfully, I think Alton Brown would point to Harold McGee, as would Shirley Corriher and Howard Hillman.
XML (Score:5, Interesting)
That could be fun....
Ted Tschopp
Re:XML (Score:5, Informative)
Chart Idea Awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Chart Idea Awesome (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps you should learn a lesson from this: read everything before you do anything. It isn't necessarily just a question how long the recipie takes, either. Sometimes a recipie will call for a tool or pan that you don't have and can't improvise easily. Sometimes you'll have to time things so that two subcomponents of a recipie come are finished at the same time. Just remember that you should know the whole recipie before starting and you'll save yourself a world of grief.
My favorite engineer recipe. (Score:5, Funny)
2. Enter the kitchen with her.
3. Do whatever she says.
Actually, if you leave out step 2 the other steps nearly always apply.
Re:My favorite engineer recipe. (Score:5, Interesting)
Mine always says, "Feed me."
I'm a much better cook than she is. That's ok, she's a much better welder. These are modern times. I make the Pad Thai, she makes the locomotives. It works for us.
I read recipies, but I don't "follow" them. I read them to get ideas, just as I use engineering manuals to get ideas, not find solutions. The books never have the questions I'm working on in them. When we ride on trains she'd be happier knowing I had designed it, I'd be happier knowing she'd built it. We don't ride trains much. We know too much.
The trick is to learn your ingredients and processes, then whatever you happen to have in the house (and/or lawn. Dandelions, purslane, violets, clover, day lilies, chicory, all wonderful foodstuffs) becomes your "recipie."
Recipies are great for the beginner or casual cook, but the idea really is to go beyond them, to use them as lab practicums to understand what you're doing and why.
Recipies are rarely presented this way though. Read James Beard's Theory and Practice of Good Cooking. It's full of recipies, but they're all there to illustrate a point, much as a good engineering manual.
KFG
Re:My favorite engineer recipe. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:My favorite engineer recipe. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been working on step 1 for 35 years without much success.
Perhaps it could be factored into a. b. c.
Tiramisu: "whisk to stiff peaks," (Score:4, Funny)
~~~
Sorry, I don't see what's so special (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sorry, I don't see what's so special (Score:3, Insightful)
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 proces
It's a forgery (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's a forgery (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's a forgery (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's a forgery (Score:5, Informative)
If you are an engineer, you could probably get one, albeit, really expensive and probably not built to easily accommodate standard kitchen stuff. :-)
By the way, there is no 'degrees Kelvin'. It is an absolute unit, and it is just 'kelvin'. Yeah, there is no 'Kelvin' only 'kelvin', unless you are saying 'Lord Kelvin' :-)
So much pedantry for the day :-) LoL
Re:It's a forgery (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never really seen angstrom capitalized. Starting it with the "latin capital A with ring above" (Å), as you use for the abbreviation, is definitely wrong.
Re:It's a forgery (Score:3, Interesting)
If this guy had used metric, every US reader would have either left his site right away or e-mailed him to complain about it.
To make matters worse, you wouldn't believe how hard it can sometimes be to find metric measuring cups in America!
Re:It's a forgery (Score:2)
At this point you should have just politely told your friends that google contains a wonderful unit conversion facility that is sure to meet their needs.
And either they will be quite contented of having to use a unit conversion utility, learn how to convert between imperial and metric in their head, start actually thinking in metric themselves for a change, or stop trying to talk to you altogether. No matter what the result, yo
Re:It's a forgery (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's a forgery (Score:4, Funny)
Re:It's a forgery (Score:2)
most don't bother with constants either. if you're a particle physicist or relativitic quantum mechanic you use the speed of light = 1 and Planck's constant = 1. everything else follows.
SI units are for... well, we call them "norms"
Re:It's a forgery (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's a forgery (Score:5, Funny)
I thought this was cooking for engineers.... (Score:5, Insightful)
YeeeEEEs! (Score:2)
What is a cup? (Score:5, Funny)
I once read a recipe : "1 cup banana"
Americans
Re:What is a cup? (Score:3, Funny)
Would you have preferred: 20cm of banana?
Re:What is a cup? (Score:3, Interesting)
Odds are the person you got your banana recipe from is so used to professional recipes that it was more natural to say say 1C than to 1.5 medium bananas. Another possiblility is the recipe was particularly intolerant to variations; I've read recipes where the amount of emulsifier (egg yolk) is calculated to be just enough to bind and so adding even a tiny bit more o
Re:What is a cup? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never seen a cooking book in the UK that uses a measurement of volume for non-liquids in a recipe. I simply have no
I mean, I have tea cups, coffee mugs, my big double sized coffee mug, an expresso cup
What if I've cubed the beef wrong and am in fact putting too little or much in?
And finally, since like forever cooking books in the UK have
I agree! (Score:5, Insightful)
Cooking v1.0 for nerds (Score:5, Funny)
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
Re:Cooking v1.0 for nerds (Score:2)
Re:Cooking v1.0 for nerds (Score:3, Funny)
Coral P2P distributed Mirror (Score:4, Informative)
Note: Cache includes images (vs google link posted above).
PS: somebody [slashdot.org] wrote a javascript bookmarklet [gotdoof.com] that'll take you to the coral cache of the page you are on. There's also a offical Coralize plugin for Mozilla [nyu.edu]
Perhaps a better approach (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Perhaps a better approach (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Perhaps a better approach (Score:3, Interesting)
I like it :) (Score:2)
More sites about cooking and geeks.... (Score:3, Informative)
Very good site...very geeky guy...very kewl recipes.
How about Open Source Cookbook (Score:2, Informative)
Open Source Cookbook [ibiblio.org]
Wikimeda Cookbook (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's Mine (Score:5, Funny)
"Microwave Until Hot"
yep, and I'm an engineer too
Phewww!! (Score:5, Funny)
Cooking Foreigners
Needs more salt.
Re:Phewww!! (Score:5, Funny)
Recipies designed for women? (Score:2)
And people wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
"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 wa
Re:And people wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
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-sci
Re:And people wonder... (Score:4, Funny)
1) Turn the box off.
2) Open the blinds, curtains, shades, etc. and check to see if it is day or night.
3) Clean up the old pizza boxes, dirty dishes, and other assorted junk around the box.
4) Clean and bleach the kitchen and bathroom, and change the sheets on the bed.
5) Shower, brush your teeth, slath on some deoderant, and dress in clean street clothes. (Put the the old plaid bathrobe you have been wearing for the past 3 months in a strong plastic bag. Or better yet burn it.)
6) Walk out the door.
This method isn't foolproof, but with the simple act of getting the hell out of the house you will increase your odds of getting laid by 100%.
Oh yes......if you do find yourself in the company of an interesting female you may further increase your odds by asking for what you want. We can't read your minds.
Just a thought from a female...
Hmm... (Score:2, Funny)
The secret to getting a story posted on /. (Score:5, Funny)
2) Submit story.
3) Allow web server to bake until golden brown.
4) Enjoy!
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
What, exactly, is so offensive about that statement? Men and women have very different information processing abilities. Don't let yourself get so wrapped up in political correctness. As I've already said in an earlier post, read the part about drawing bicycles. [abc.net.au] Ignoring scientific fact in the name of political correctness is for politicians, not nerds :-)
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:yhbt hand (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
n.
1. Discrimination based on gender, especially discrimination against women.
2. Attitudes, conditions, or behaviors that promote stereotyping of social roles based on gender.
Note in particular definition 2. The original sentence was a blanket statement with nothing to back it up and no purpose other than to say "hey, look, women are *different* and *weird*". Sexism is about more than calling people bad. If you must find an insult in there before you're satisfied, compare "funny" with "for engineers"; the implication being that the latter is superior while the former is odd and ineffective.
If there had been any context whatsoever for the statement, I wouldn't have bothered to say anything, but the fact that it was so out of place led me to speak up.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're still reaching when it comes to a direct insult. Half the people that call me "funny" don't mean it precisely as a compliment, and definitely don't imply superiority. And, I'm sure plenty of the women that are excellent cooks are perfectly proud of their abilities, so I don't see why it's presumed to be odd and ineffective to refer to them as "funny" in the same manner.
The biggest generalization of the statement is the i
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Informative)
Wo what is going on here?
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Funny)
Not that you're not absolutely right about cooking, though.
Re:Blind! Stop being PC long enough to read... (Score:3, Insightful)
On a side note, the original site's recipe format would w
Weighing (Score:4, Insightful)
Not measuring by volume.
Especialy with dry good(flour, etc)
chemistry for the cook (Score:3, Informative)
CSS mindwarps (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Cooking HOWTO videos (Score:5, Informative)
The videos are in Real format, just in case you were wondering.
Logical sequential layout. (Score:3)
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.
I'm a Woman here (Score:3, Interesting)
Cool recipe format, but... (Score:3)
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.
Is it for cannibals? (Score:3, Funny)
I don't get it - it's like most recipes I see. (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Real recipe engineering (Score:5, Informative)
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. [nicholsonequipment.com]. 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) [hornoslago.com] need even finer control.
There are safety issues. See this microorganism lethality calculator. [rpaulsingh.com] That's a key part of an industrial recipe.
Here are some engineered home recipes [qis.net]. These are intended for use in a programmable home bread-making machine. [walmart.com] 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.So that means ... (Score:5, Funny)
Real engineers use standard units (Score:5, Insightful)
the charts are interesting, but (Score:3, Informative)
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
tech cooking (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. I love to cook -- it makes people happy to serve them good food, I get to play with knives, alcohol, and fire, and I find it a great way to relax after work. Work for me is software development, and I see a lot of parallels between my profession and cooking. The way I look at it, in both you are given a set of tools and basic rules to follow -- in software the "rules" may be syntax or design patterns, in cooking it may be "rosemary goes w