The Common Kitchen Blog

The Runner’s Cookbook

It’s worth making particular mention of a cookbook just added to Common Kitchen: The Runner’s Cookbook, a collection of about 100 recipes gathered and edited by our friend Alison Wade. As described on the official book site,

The Runner’s Cookbook features 100 recipes from 90+ contributors, including Joan Benoit Samuelson, Sebastian Coe, Shalane Flanagan, Adam and Kara Goucher, Ryan and Sara Hall, Deena Kastor, Craig Mottram, Dathan Ritzenhein, Khadevis Robinson, Alan Webb, and many others. All of the proceeds from the sales of this book will be split evenly between Ryan Shay and Jenny Crain’s funds.

If those names mean anything to you, this will be an interesting cookbook to you. I’ve made Adam and Kara Goucher’s contribution (Veggie and Chicken Stir-Fry) a few times now, and it’s worth getting the cookbook for that one alone.

Our link goes to Amazon by default, but if you buy the book through the publisher, Lulu.com, a greater slice of the purchase price will go to the cookbook’s fund-raising beneficiaries.

Common Cucina

Last Friday, Common Media, Inc., the producers of Common Kitchen, launched the first stage of the new website we’re building for the re-launched American edition of La Cucina Italiana, the Italian lifestyle magazine.

What does this mean for Common Kitchen? Plenty. Without the strength of this site and this community, we wouldn’t have this work. What’s more, this work will give us the opportunity to continue developing Common Kitchen, improving our data model, our design and user interface, and potentially other benefits to our CK members as the relationship develops.

La Cucina Italiana is known for their recipes, and the developers of the website for the flagship Italian magazine assured us that recipes were the primary reason people visit their site. You can easily see why, with thousands of tested Italian recipes available at lacucinaitaliana.it. We’ll be developing in that direction for the U.S. edition as well, and the lessons we learn there will come back to Common Kitchen in the same way the lessons we’ve learned here are being applied to La Cucina Italiana.

We haven’t been ignoring Common Kitchen, even as the new site has taken much of our time. We’ve recently moved to a new server to give the site more space (in terms of both disk space and performance), and in a recent update we added “WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Get) editing tools to text boxes on the site to assist you in formatting blog posts and recipe descriptions, among other things. We’ll continue posting updates here as we make improvements and add features to the site.

John Thorne and exploring a dish

I read an article a few weeks ago in the Daily Hampshire Gazette’s Hampshire Weekly insert about John Thorne and his work at the Hungry Ghost bakery in Northampton, MA. Thorne, the author of several books and a newsletter, Simple Cooking, I’ve mentioned here before, but the part of this article which leapt out at me had less to do with his writing and more to do with his approach to recipes. (I’d link the article, but the Gazette restricts articles on its website to subscribers.)

Thorne told the author that he tends to pick up a recipe and make it over and over again, tinkering with it and refining it, until he arrives at a point where he thinks further refinement isn’t worthwhile. (This is probably not uncommon.) Cooking can be a work of inspiration for him, but not necessarily.

This is encouraging for two reasons; first, it shows an example of the trial and frequent error (or at least, infrequent brilliance) that most of us can actually maintain in the kitchen. But second, Thorne appears to have wholly freed himself from the idea of variety in his menu. Certainly his tastes are wide-ranging, but he finds variety on a monthly or weekly scale, not a daily one. Many of us make the same breakfast for months, if not years, but Thorne expands that approach to lunch and sometimes dinner.

I like this because it essentially gives me permission to eat the same thing(s) repeatedly, with minor variation. I get easily bored with the same dinners, but I’ll make the same sandwich over and over, with every new idea (hey! I should try a different mustard!) making it something new and re-setting the variety clock.

Of course, this doesn’t lead to someone posting a lot of recipes to Common Kitchen, but perhaps removing the performance pressure of making something new each day can lead to more interesting and refined ones.

Free Food Blogs

Amid the big announcements last week, one big feature of Common Kitchen got underplayed, and now may be a good time to highlight it.The simple summary is this: if you’re a Common Kitchen user, you can keep a free food blog on the site. Just go to the “My Account” link on the left, and you’ll see a link which says something like, “Create Your Blog.” And there it is. Take a look at mine, for example.The point of these blogs is a bit more complicated. Every recipe on Common Kitchen has a source, whether that’s a cookbook, a magazine, or a website. But anyone who has been cooking for more than a few weeks has at least one recipe kicking around which bears no relation to any published source. How would you put that recipe on Common Kitchen?The answer is: post it on your blog. Now the blog is the source. That’s what I did with my sweet potato fries, for example. As I was writing the post, I checked a box at the bottom of the form which said, “Add this as a recipe to Common Kitchen,” and now the recipe is listed on the site (and quite well rated, as well, since I fed them to Noah and medfordgardener.)There’s nothing stopping you from using your blog to write about other things, like musing on oregano or even non-food-related details.  It’s yours, after all. So now that I’ve rambled on, what do you have to say?

Being useful: Answering questions

Our discussions in the past week or so about what development needs doing on Common Kitchen has centered on the phrase “usefulness.” The idea comes from what Josh Porter of bokardo.com calls “the del.icio.us lesson”: that personal value to a single user comes before network value. (If you’ve never met del.icio.us, it’s a site which allows you to store your bookmarks on the web rather than on a single computer… and it also allows you to share any site you bookmark with your friends or the ‘net at large. Now owned by Yahoo!, Del.icio.us was an early pioneer in tagging.) Put another way, if nobody else used the site, would it still be useful?

If the answer is “no,” that doesn’t make the site useless, but it does make the site vulnerable to what Porter calls “the cold start problem,” the chicken-and-egg problem a site faces when it’s most useful when it has a lot of users, but needs to become useful in order to attract those users.

So the work we’re focusing on now is on making Common Kitchen useful even to a limited number of users, and one of the features we’ve added in this direction is Questions. Questions addresses the problem of missing information on the site by allowing you to ask for it. By way of example, consider this question Noah posted: he’s looking for a good pasta salad recipe, can anyone recommend one?

Or consider one of the elemental questions asked by everyone who’s ever planted a garden plot: what do I do with all this zucchini? (You have heard, of course, of the gardener who left a single zucchini sitting out on the back seat of his locked car? He returned to the car to find a window broken, and, rushing to see what had been stolen, found he now had two zucchini.)

Questions let you ask about recipes now, but as we improve the system, you’ll be able to ask for restaurant recommendations, cookbook (and cooking) help, or plain old advice. Take a look at the questions which are already here, and drop in a suggestion or ask a question of your own.

Congrats to RecipeZaar!

E.W. Scripps’ acquisition of recipe sharing site RecipeZaar.com is the latest in a series of M&A in that sector, and we couldn’t be happier for them. They should benefit immensely from an association with the Food Network people, and we look forward to watching the ride.