News You Can Bruise for 2003 January 18

Spyblog ("Simple Python blogger"). It's got comments!

I like fancy cookbooks, with their pictures and their coherent themes, but what I really like is enormous collections of recipes in electronic form, thrown together by user-contribution serendipity and given form by desperate one-word categorizations[0]. In my BBS days I would scour BBSes for packages of Meal Master-readable recipes and hoard them on my BBS, possibly only ever preparing one or two recipes found in the whole corpus. Nowadays I cook a lot more, so I have more than an academic interest in lists of recipes. Here are a few sites, including a couple I found just now while researching this entry.

• Recipe Circus, a chaotic Geocities for personal recipe lists. Goes first on the list because it's run by JB Hiller, my old co-worker from MAP.
• RecipeSource, which takes the prize for sheer number of recipes. This is what I use most often. Sumana is on her way over to my house right now and we're going to make pasta with tomato-avocado sauce. It also includes silly recipes for extinct arthropods like Ammonite Chowder and Trilobite Creole.
• Michael Witbrock's Recipe Archive Index is very old-school and includes recipes from the uncanny valley of food, like sourdough chocolate cake.
• I don't really trust the fancy interface to Epicurious' recipe index, {but, and} the recipes therein are taken from fancy cooking magazines, so the recipes are more highbrow; not many recipes there in which pudding is an ingredient. However, there are good-looking recipes for fancy puddings, like pumpkin bread pudding and Lemon Surprise Pudding ("[T]he surprise being that it's chocolate").

[0] Also, I really like the self-published cookbooks that you see in tourist traps and restaurant gift shops while on road trips. I've never bought one, though.

The tomato-avocado pasta was delicious! I recommend it. We used penne instead of linguini, because I don't like the long hairlike pastas. We also added asiago cheese, which was successful. The recipe says it makes four servings, but between the two of us we licked the platter clean.