Rants, Raves and Revelations – August

Adventures in Recipe Hunting – You’re likely still looking in the wrong places and missing great food!

By Harry {doc} Babad © 2007 Food network

So you like to cook. In this my latest food related article, after a few twists and turns, I’ll share an approach to recipe hunting that’s both fun and rewarding. It is also obscure, adventurous and likely at times frustrating. For the most part what you’ll find is either not kitchen tested or made with difficult to get ingredients. The later is true even if you live in New York, Quebec, Shanghai, London, Hong Kong or San Francisco. Read on and you lean about the world of food blogs and Google images, yes I said Google images, some of the richest recipe sources I found. But first let me take you for a walk down gourmet lane or we all burn the toast at times.

Getting Started in the TV and Internet Age — If you wander the web sites tied to cooking shows, subscribe to magazines about food or even homemaking (and their associated sites) or visit food products websites you are no longer taking cooking 101. Actually, from a cooking expertise point of view, you’re a level deeper than most of us when we started. Your probably know the difference between boiling and baking, grilling and broiling and even understand the meaning of poaching. [No your can’t climb over the wall and hunt for pheasant deer!]

I got hooked in graduate school, cooking for some guys who hated to in exchange for food costs and access to a car to go grocery-shopping in. [Hey New Yorkers for the most part don’t need to drive. You just take the “A” train.] One of them, Pete is still my friend; I hope the others haven’t died of food poisoning.

I and lots of folks with whom I swap recipes with, started cooking from wonderful books such as America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, Betty Crocker Cookbook, Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, and my favorites the Joy of Cooking and the Fanny Farmer Cookbook. Then we drifted off to specially cook books to teach us our favorite foreign restaurant cuisines, or moved upscale to more fancy cuisines like those taught by the late Julia Child. Like many other foodies, we all collected and acquired and subscribed to cookbook clubs. One surprise when I married almost four decades ago, she’s a better cook than I am, was that very few of our hundreds do cookbooks were duplicated.

Remember this was all BI, the dark ages before the Internet… you wanted to cook you either read a book or newspaper or magazine or took a class or three.

Previous Cooking Articles on macC — In my precious recipe related articles I shared the how tos of enhancing recipes download from the Internet (Check macC December 2006 and January & February 2007.) Along the way I provided you with a sprinkling some of my often searched sites, including those from food boards, grill manufactures, and the sites of many of the makers of the products you buy and use. But you’ve not yet gotten in very deep if you stick to those or the sites associated with Food oriented magazines and Food TV.

Magazines —

You may subscribe, as I do, to Gourmet, Bon Appetit, or Food & Wine magazine or to the more health oriented Eating Well or one of the vegan magazines. Each of these quality magazines, including Sunset, provides not only the clearly described (and often illustrated) recipes but also shares things about the people who created and the cuisine they’re from. It’s the extra zing that makes great cookbooks so much fun to read. It’s now easy to read an issue of a magazine, at home or waiting for the dentist, and hop to the website to grab a recipe that catches your fancy. Or you can, skip the magazine, but I’m a born and born again reader, feeling naked without a book or magazine in my hand or briefcase. Now I don’t pay much attention to Better Homes and Gardens, Martha Stewart Living, Woman’s Day or Family Circle. My wife does read several of these, but I rarely do.

However, on occasion they have something interesting to offer. Alas they’re what I’m likely to find in doctors offices since other offerings are less interesting, I by default flip pages to the food section. It’s not that there are no fine recipes in these homemaker-oriented offerings. However fighting my way though their websites — adds, more adds including popup offers, you pickem. There are weight loss products; uncertified natural aides for all my ills, youth restoratives, nick knacks and collectables, and other waste of my time in my face stuff that makes me avoid them. Also, for the most part, their websites, from the perspective of chasing recipes, try my patience since they seldom have a printer friendly version, and I hate scrubbing PDFs.

Food Network a Treasure Trove and a Then a Bit More Googling — We’ve talked briefly about books and magazines, but this is the year 2007 and we’ve got cable or satellite TV! That often leads you not only to shows but also their websites.

Perhaps you’ve got favorite chefs on the Food Network TV or by jumping straight to the Interne. Perhaps its food created by Rachel Ray, Emeril “lets kick it up a notch” Lagasse, Alton Brown, Paula Deen, the elegant Giada De Laurentiis, Bobby Flay who never burns food while grilling, Nigella Lawson – whose kinky comfort foods are a turn on, Ina Garten (aka the barefoot Contessa), Sara Moulton who writes for Gourmet and Bon Appetit or talented Wolfgang Puck. The mouth watering and often rich treats created these fine cooks and others are all accessible from foodnetwork.com. If you downloading their recipes you can often find a matching image on Google to add to the PDF of your favorite download. And again you need blinders on not to get into a do loop.

Horray for the Internet, Let’s play!

What a Wealth of Hits, Misses and Almost Misses — Type in the word shrimp or seafood in the Food Network search engine and you get 1,386 and 4,043 hits respectively. In goggle images you get 1,200,000 hits for seafood couple with both a thumbnail image and a link, or perhaps to a great new recipe of three.

The search engine hits all kinds of sites: blogs, cookbook dealers sometimes with sample recipes in the book descriptions, dedicated cooking sites, restaurants with menus and short descriptions of dishes. Doing the same at the more focused Epicurious site, the home of Gourmet and Bon Appetit Magazines, gets you 654 and but only 91 for seafood, since their indexing system is different. Straight, unmodified googling (not Google images) for “shrimp recipes” gives 142,000 hits, while “oriental shrimp” recipes narrows my choices to a mere 3,450 hits.

The Wonder of Email Subscriptions — Perhaps you subscribe as I do to some of the experts at About.com. I live the Chinese food that Rhonda Parkinson shares as well as the great Thai food from Darlene Schmidt. I’m beginning to tune into Nancy Gaifylla’s Greek food, but am less enamored of the Italian recipes emailed by Kyle Phillips. I’ve also started checking whether “Gourmet Food” by Bredt Moore or Saad Fayad’s Middle Eastern Cooking newsletter from About.com are worth reading, and preserving or even trying out. I also thoroughly enjoy and have started trading recipes with Ms. Lila Voo the Chinese food editor at BellaOnLine, a women’s site. I’ve not played checked out Katherine Hunter’s (Greek), Mary-Anne Durkee (Thai), Sandie Jarrett’s (Cajun & Creaole) or Sadhana Ginde’s (India) BellaOnLine offerings, after all I’ve got articles to write, money to raise for an acoustic music festival and even a textbook to complete.

Okay, my subscriptions tell you I’m into Oriental and middle-eastern including Greek food. What really has become fun, searching for hidden treasure, when I’m dragged out and can’t write is to take random walks on food or occasionally foodie type travel blogs.

The Blogosphere and Flickr or Google Images — At this point things get weirder than usual in my articles. What follows is in not an either or experience. Rather it’s a fine game of click around the Internet.

Images can lead to blogs can lead to more images to other websites to… and the World Wide Web keeps a turning.

Your choices are varied and there’s no right way to play.

Do a Google search for a recipe name or major ingredient to cuisine

Do a Google images search for a recipe name or major ingredient

Do a Flickr images focusing on food, recipes and cooking

Use a blogosphere engine to chase food or cooking or perhaps recipes.

Even Forbes magazine has noticed food blogs, will Business Week or the Economist be next?

One Step Further into Strange — I pick a favorite food or ingredient and search for food image of that item. I usually use Google; and almost always find a cornucopia of foods ordinary or esoteric cooked in ways I’d not considered.

Pick a cuisine; let’s say Turkish food and search for restaurants in Google. There are only, at least today, 2,230,000 of them listed. Or go directly to the Turkish Anatolia link http://www.anatolia.com/anatolia/ypages/restaurants.asp, which seems either somewhat selective or out of date so after a few clicks, I moved on. Pick a suggested restaurant, and read its menu. Then either Google or Google Images the result and start clicking. And found some real gems or should I say treats. Okay, you’re not into Turkish, how about Chinese noodles, giant hamburgers, oriental crepes or Thai BBQ?

With respect to restaurants, I recently did this for the Thai restaurant called the Typhoon, which a friend recommended. Although I live in Washington State and these are located in WA and OR state, I don’t wander much these days so checking out the real thing is not as much an option as when I was 10 years younger. http://www.typhoonrestaurants.com/

Then there’s P. F. Chang Restaurant’s, a favorite when I take occasional business trips to Tucson and Phoenix. I found some great recipes that only, damn, represented 10% of the menu. However, P. F. Chang is coming to the Tri-Cities so I won’t have to travel to either Tucson or Phoenix elsewhere out of town to enjoy the food. I’m sure I could make an edible, perhaps even good version of many of their dishes, but why waste the effort when I can drive a few miles and get the real thing.

Finding a Foodie Blog – There are now search engines that will look for blogs related to… type in a topic and see what you get. I tend to use Google’s Blog Engine http://blogsearch.google.com/?tab=wb/ because I like its interface. Searching for cooking blogs on Google, I got 383,08 hits a few dozen of which looked interesting because of their international flavor.

In addition to Google I’ve tried, always late at night, the always dependable Technorati Blog search engine http://www.technorati.com/blogs/ and the at times interesting http://www.blogarama.com/.

Most of the hits on Google blogs lead to book commercials, or sites with blab and pictures but no recipes. Also the hits are well represented with restaurants. All of this is okay! You’re only a click or three away from instant gratification at least for the eye and imagination. But when you get a winner, there’s much there to whet you’re appetite.

Remember, it’s like picking ripe tomatoes or fresh of the tree fruit, blogs are ephemeral. Indeed over the last year, two of links I’ve used in previous macC cooking articles are dead, gone, vanished. http://www.stefmike.org/mtarchives/cat culinary html/. Not longer is a hit but I found a way to get to it at http://www.daxiang.stefmike.org/. However, a fine if strange site called http://www.femalebridesonline.com/ has become a high-class oriental bridal shop site — the recipes exchanges are gone. Find a site you like —harvest what pleases you, when you have the chance

Google Images; Backwards Forwards and Sideways — In addition to the hit or miss nature of the search, finding an image that looks interesting and following the link only to discover the blogger has not provided the recipe for the dish. But think of it as an opportunity for a new Google search. On many blogs there a great pictures of, but, alas, no recipes.

Foods that seemed interesting included Thai Chap Chye and Chye Poh noodles, rack of lamb oriental, chicken noodles four seasoning soup, bacon spinach pizza, and Gai Lan (Chinese broccoli). So I put a few of these images that had no recipes attached to their linked pages, labeled with the names of each dish, into a folder to chase on another day. Incase you get Google imaged out, there’s always recipes at Flickr. Some Flickr pictures even come with a link to the recipe on the photographer’s blog, so the hunt goes on. http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Recipes&w=36075285%40N00/.

Enough said.

Enjoy he food images, and play. If you don’t kike what I found, send me your favorite sites and I’ll check them out. But always remember, there are lots more, less obvious, places to find food recipe favorites. You are only limited by the time you want to spend. The other virtue of treasure hunting is that with a hold the salt, cut down a bit of the fat and for me “hotten it up.” The dishes are likely better for you than moms traditional southern fried or butter rich cooking, which I love but my arteries don’t.

Bon chance and bon appetit!

Doc

PS.

Every time I find a website with some interesting recipes I drag the link to a folder annotated, with a few descriptive terms if needed, with a few words. I’m up to near 1000 links while my recipe collection (electronic only) has grown to 1.67 GB (about 16,000 items). It beats hanging around bars or OD-ing on expensive toys for my hobbies. But if all of this is a bit too adventurous for you, check out your favorite cuisine at Wikipedia and flow the links to other links to…