RecipeThing Times

Head above water

2007-07-08T14:57:00.001-07:00

So between feedings and diaper changes I've finally managed to push a couple of new features live! The recipe list view is improved a bit (at least, I think it's an improvement) and you can now rate your own recipes. Thanks so much to our faithful RecipeThing users who have so politely asked for new features. Let me know in the comments to this post what you'd like to see next...

Checking in...

2007-02-13T11:50:00.000-08:00

Hi RecipeThingers -

Long time no see. I had a guilt complex when user Lisa wrote:

Nick, I LOVE the recipe thing, and have started using it and telling my friends about it. However, your blog is somewhat outdated (Thanksgiving is your last update??) Are you supporting/updating recipe thing?? I would be so disappointed if you were not!

So I wrote back to Lisa letting her know that RecipeThing is still alive and kicking and we will be rolling out some new features in the coming weeks. The excuse is that we have a new RecipeThing user at our house who is just four weeks old!

Happy Thanksgiving!

2006-11-22T16:41:00.000-08:00

To you and yours. We are busily making pumpkin pies and sweet potatoes to take over to our friends' for dinner tomorrow. Whatever you are cooking, have a good time!

Thanksgiving Resource

2006-11-15T14:42:00.000-08:00

WaPo has a great online food section for Thanksgiving, coming up next week!

Food in (Internet) Space

2006-11-03T09:28:00.000-08:00

Well, well, there has been quite a flurry of happenings in the food agglomeration of the cyber whosits. First of all, RecipeThing lauched. That was a seminal moment.

No, no, seriously. A few days ago whilst we all slept, Yahoo went live with "Yahoo Food." It is a very attractive site, and it appears to be highly informed by All Recipe's color palette even--this does look like a very collaborative venture. It's got vids and so forth. So that's quite a find, and probably a good move for Yahoo.

Thanks to Google Blogoscoped for their work on this. They did a mockup of what a Google-Food page would look like, and it advocates a trick that RecipeThing does, i.e. to let you put a recipe in your database.

Chicken Soup

2006-10-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

We have been a little under the weather here at RecipeThing, and I made some chicken soup. That got me to remembering a conference I went to where the presenter, Dr. Stephen Rennard, a pulmonologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, talked about his clinical research into the salutary effects of the medicinal broth. Bottom line: it works!

Here is the recipe from Dr. Rennard's study (here is the abstract), which I got from his website at the University.

1 5- to 6-pound stewing hen or baking chicken
1 package of chicken wings
3 large onions
1 large sweet potato
3 parsnips
2 turnips
11 to 12 large carrots
5 to 6 celery stems
1 bunch of parsley
Salt and pepper to taste

Clean the chicken, put it in a large pot and cover it with cold water. Bring the water to boil. Add the chicken wings, onions, sweet potato, parsnips, turnips and carrots. Boil about 1 and a half hours. Remove fat from the surface as it accumulates. Add the parsley and celery. Cook the mixture about 45 min. longer. Remove the chicken. The chicken is not used further for the soup. (The meat makes excellent chicken parmesan.) Put the vegetables in a food processor until they are chopped fine or pass through a strainer. Both were performed in the present study. Salt and pepper to taste. (Note: This soup freezes well.)

Matzoh balls were prepared according to the recipe on the back of the box of matzoh meal (Manischewitz).

Behold the blogroll!

2006-10-05T17:18:00.000-07:00

So I finally got some time to sit down and work on my blogroll here. Mind you, I've not finished yet. I am not discriminating, so if you would like your foodblog listed, let me know! This post is dedicated to all those wonderful foodbloggers out there and the cool stuff they do. Take a look at some of these people's blogs, they are good.

Some weekend updates

2006-10-02T07:31:00.000-07:00

So, after a busy weekend, we got some changes uploaded to the site. Hopefully you will like them.

1. Added a tab for easy access to the Potluck page

2. Also on the potluck page, we have changed the "most popular recipes" to "popular right now," i.e. recipes that have been copied most recently. We will add more stuff like this in the future.

3. Added "Advanced Search" (lots of you have emailed about this, so give it a try and see if it does what you need it to.

Welcome, WSJ Readers

2006-09-29T07:23:00.000-07:00

We're so happy we appeared in the Wall Street Journal today. Welcome to those of you here for the first time. We are still in beta and we are working on implementing our cooks' feedback. If you have an idea for RecipeThing, let us know. Thanks!

A few updates

2006-09-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

Due to popular request we've made a few updates. Thanks to all who gave feedback, and if you don't see your requests implemented yet, it means we haven't quite figured out how. I don't think we got any feedback that wouldn't improve the site. So here goes:

Potluck page. We cleaned this up some and bumped off some folks who have little recipe collections. You can still access them, though, by using the "all users" link. Still to come: a new tab for the page to access it more easily. OH and I almost forgot: we are spotlighting the most popular recipes at the top of the page (by popular we mean ones that people have chosen to copy for their own purposes).

Pantry. We got feedback letting us know that the shopping list aisle feature should be autopopulated or have fixed choices or somesuch. However, aren't all stores different? And furthermore, what if you usually buy a specific ingredient at a special store? Don't you want to be able to lump all those things together? Yes, we decided, in order to truly automate the kitchen process, you need to customize the aisles to your habits. But we did make it easier! Now, you can add your aisle and RecipeThing will autofill the rest of your selection, kind of like gmail addresses.

And possibly most exciting of all...

You can put links in recipes! You heard right!! I have been struggling with the recipes for, say, cinnamon rolls, or sugar cookies. Don't you have one frosting recipe you always use for that? I do. Anyhoo, here is an example of this phenomenon. So now, I can either in the comments or in the directions, link to that recipe. For directions on how to do that, check your recipe entry area

Housekeeping. Links were funky at the bottom of the page, worked in IE but not Firefox. Got that fixed. Added our favicon.

Many more features to come. Thanks for hanging with us!

Chard and Cheese Pie

2006-09-02T19:27:00.000-07:00

From Lex Culinaria, here is an awesome-looking chard and cheese pie, with its recipe.

Toll House Pie

2006-09-01T07:25:00.000-07:00

I came across a photo of Toll House Pie over at Kalyn's Kitchen yesterday. It looked so good, I found a recipe for it and pulled it into my box. Here it is!

Recipes for a rainy day

2006-09-01T07:01:00.000-07:00

We're getting a TON of rain from the tropical storm coming up the East Coast right now. So, I thought, what is good food to eat on a cool rainy day? Plus, it's now September. Here are some selections from the site:

ShannonO has Pasta Carbonara
Holm has Golden Cream Soup
Mojeaux has a classic take on Snickerdoodles, for dessert

And how about some bread? Cornbread is good on a rainy day, but that doesn't go with our soup. Something darker would be good like this copycat recipe.

What's the weather like where you are?

Actually, all of that is day dreaming because doing good on my diet :)

From Russia with Love

2006-08-30T10:35:00.000-07:00

Cool recipes are appearing on the site. We have recipes from India, from Russia, and lots of other places. That's the cool thing about recipes, they're an awesome way to connect with others and to connect with your own history at the same time. Woo hoo!

Danke für Ihren Eintrag über uns

2006-08-29T11:59:00.000-07:00

The German blog web2null gave us a write up a little while ago. Here is what it says:

With RecipeThing, you can manage and publish your own recipes or see other users' recipes. As an additional feature, you can enter what you would like to cook and what you have available to get a shopping list for the missing ingredients.

It's true!

Just a little news

2006-08-29T06:15:00.000-07:00

We have gotten a couple of feature requests, which is awesome and we will implement them as soon as we can. Meantime, send your ideas to me if you would like to.

We've been featured on several blogs since yesterday, thanks to all who wrote. (I hope that thanking people doesn't insult anyone's journalistic integrity :)

Museum of Modern Betas
Lifehack.org - thanks Chris!
Cooking with Miklb
Flying Seeds
Super Justin
BAMCAT - the blog

And PostBubble says we may float!! So that's good news. Thanks for stopping by RecipeThing, and be sure to tell us what your favorite recipes are. Then we can help you shop for ingredients and so forth.

I have to say that I'm on a diet right now, which is hard because I'm looking at all this food all the time. However, you can use RecipeThing to help you with your diet recipes too, because I think that organization is a HUGE problem when it comes to actually sticking to a weight-loss plan. You know?

Thanks for our first big day!

2006-08-28T18:34:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone who helped spread the word about RecipeThing. We have some improvements to make on the site, but it's good to see some folks like the idea. Please let me know if you have any ideas or things you would like to see on the site.

Blog issues

2006-08-28T17:31:00.000-07:00

Bear with us as we switch from WordPress to Blogger...

Welcome to RecipeThing

2006-08-28T16:56:00.000-07:00

We're pleased to roll out RecipeThing Times, the official blog here at RecipeThing! Thanks so much for dropping by.

RecipeThing is a new web-based software app. The point of it is to allow folks to get organized with their recipes. Along the way, it will allow people to do lots of other fun stuff such as emailing grandma's pot-roast recipe to Tajikistan, and to connect with other cooks who use kumquats (that's my favorite word lately).

So take a look around and feel free to drop us a line.