Hunting, gathering and Googling

I am actively avoiding food porn. No more cruising the aisles of glossy cookbooks, or sitting glassy-eyed in front of TV cooking shows. Instead, I am trying to cook from my own, quite substantial collection of cookbooks and clippings.

The picture below is from my school cookbook. Haven’t cooked many things from it yet, as they are mostly hideous… [Click image to view recipe for “Ham banana rolls with cheese sauce”. I scanned it in big, so that you can print it out and cook it yourself. If you dare.]

Please let me know if you attempt to cook this. I'd love to know what it tastes like.

The trouble is, my recipes are not particularly well indexed and, in geek-speak, need better metadata. So despite having a lot of cookbooks, I often have to Google particular recipes. (Perhaps my husband, who doesn’t often read my blog,  will create a lovely database of my recipes?)

When I first met the wondrous Internet, the entire office shared one email address, and it was actually “E-mail”. I’d read about The Web in very attractive Wired magazines, but didn’t appreciate the amazing bounty of information out there until I saw the recipe sites.

For my younger readers, this is what web pages used to look like:

Note the lack of images, videos, advertising etc etc

Brought to you by the Interweb – Herb haters

Went to a fab restaurant this week, where we had: “Buttermilk pannacotta, with coriander jelly, pain d’epice, pineapple granita”. Sounds odd, but it was delicious.  I just found a site for coriander/cilantro haters http://www.ihatecilantro.com/ .