As far back as 2004 when I first put up the site, I was trying to find a way of organizing recipes and cooking notes. I then started homebrewing, which made things much more complicated. There are various recipe systems, but nothing that reconciles my cooking, homebrewing, and occasional notes and scribbles. After a terrible experience trying to learn JavaScript for a homegrown recipe system, I decided I’d be better off just puking off a blog.
Let’s be certain: this blog primarily fulfills my own self-interests, and it’s a good coincidence that anybody else catches it and finds it useful in some way. This lets me search recipes and collect notes. It gives me a convenient place to forward my recipes to friends and family. It can also give me a chance to list which Muppet I am, what is in my fridge right now, my current song, and current mood. I don’t have the time for that (thank God), so I hope this blog stays to topic. I can always make a regular old casual blog later.
Here are some comments from the original food section of my site–going back to 2004:
Cooking
I’ve been cooking for awhile — anybody who knows me nowadays wouldn’t be surprised to find me putting cooking information on the web. I’ve been keeping tabs on Alton Brown’s show Good Eats. However, some of the stuff on there is just strange, so I don’t know how much of a fanboy I am. I also follow Usenet newsgroups; you’d be shocked how well those newsgroups are run these days. Here are the newsgroups I am following:
- alt.cooking-chat — This is smaller than rec.food.cooking, which means I can actually follow it.
- rec.food.cooking — This is the big momma newsgroup. I tend to search here and also ask my harder questions.
- alt.cookies.yum.yum.yum — I thought the newsgroup name was amusing, so I subscribed. It has lots of recipes for cookies, cookie bars, and things like them.
- rec.crafts.brewing — Just for soda making. I’m not very interesting in making my own beer . . . yet (things have change–I’ve been brewing since 2005, all-grain for all of 2006, and so on).
- rec.crafts.winemaking — Since the brewing group is preoccupied with grains.
- rec.food.recipes — Carries random recipes. People tend to fulfill recipe requests.
- alt.binaries.food — This stands out in the alt.binaries world of porn and warez as a group where people post images of . . . food. People will then talk about it!
In terms of cooking tools and such, I’ve been having good luck with Amazon.com of all places. They have Friday sales where they’re often getting rid of a lot of kitchen stuff for cheap. Couple that with free shopping and $25 off $125, and it’s quite a deal. However, I often then have to accumulate a little wishlist to order all at once.