Month: November 2019
Dr. Tannis Morgan (Explorations in the Ed Tech World)Sometimes you read a post that is so insightful that it shifts your entire way of thinking and seeing. I felt this way when I first read Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Henry Trotter’s Social Justice Framework for open education and Sarah Lambert’s Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education . Both of these articles helped me push through some of the things I was struggling with in relation to open education, namely how do you talk about the relationship between language, power, and knowledge (and colonial consequences) in relation to the goodwill gestures of putting OER out into the world.
The hold and what motivated it is at the heart of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.
According to Michigan State University Extension, egg color is determined by the genetics of the hens. The breed of the hen will indicate what color eggs she will produce. For example, Leghorn chickens lay white eggs while Orpington’s lay brown eggs and Ameraucana produce blue eggs. An Olive Egger, a chicken that lays olive green eggs, is the product of a cross between a hen and rooster that are from a brown egg and a blue egg laying breed. An interesting tip is to look at the chicken’s ear lobes; typically those with white ear lobes produce white eggs.
TIL: the color of a chicken’s egg is highly correlated with the color of its ear!
Chef and food instructor takes a look at the history of recipes and how they're frequently misinterpreted.
(Hat tip to Jeremy Cherfas and his excellent Eat This Podcast episode Making sense of modern recipes: It’s not your fault; even professional chefs encounter problems for directing me to Hertzmann’s paper; some of my favorite episodes feature Jeremy interviewing him.)
Keep in mind that the paper which is highlighted and excerpted here is a draft version and not for direct citation or attribution.
recipe is simply ‘a statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making something’.2 There is no guarantee implied or stated that the cook will understand either the statement of ingredients or the procedure. ❧
–November 24, 2019 at 02:41PM
Fourteenth-century recipe collections that have survived to today, such as Viandier pour appareiller toutes manières de viandes, Libre de sent sovi, Daz bûch von gûter spîse, and Forme of Cury, were written by professional cooks to use as an aide-mémoire for themselves or other professional cooks. ❧
–November 24, 2019 at 02:42PM
Le Ménagier de Paris, written near the end of the century was arguably the first cookbook written as a set of instructions for a second party to use when managing a third party, in this case, for the young wife of an elderly gentleman to use as a guide for household management including supervising the cook. ❧
It’s not indicated well here in the text, but this was written in 1393 according to the footnote.
Le Ménagier de Paris, 2 vols (Paris: the author, 1393; repr. Paris: Jerome Pichon, 1846)
–November 24, 2019 at 02:43PM
The suggested alternative cooking technique ignores that braising is performed slowly, with low heat, and in a steam environment. ❧
–November 24, 2019 at 03:15PM
Lincoln suggested that all volumetric measurements required an adjective such as heaping, rounded, or level.2 ❧
I’ve heard of these, but not seen them as descriptors in quite a while and they always seemed “fluffy” to me anyway.
–November 24, 2019 at 03:25PM
Kosher salt: This salt should in practice be referred to as koshering salt, its original purpose. U.S. chefs started using Diamond Crystal-brand Kosher Salt in the 1990s because it was the only coarse salt commonly available to them. Rather than specify a brand or coarseness in their cookbooks, they chose the unfortunate term of ‘kosher salt’. Kosher salt is not purer than other salts, and all kosher salts are not equal. When measured volumetrically, all kosher salts have different amounts of salt. Nonetheless, many authors insist on specifying a volumetric amount of kosher salt—‘1 teaspoon kosher salt’—but do not identify the brand being used.36 ❧
The only author I’ve known to differentiate has been Michael Ruhlman, but even he didn’t specify the brand and essentially said that when using “Kosher salt” to use twice as much as specified compared to standard table salt, presumably to account for the densities involved.
–November 24, 2019 at 03:38PM
This is to say, the ingredients and the quantities thereof are indicated by pictures which most illiterate persons can understand and persons with poor vision can see; and which are readily grasped by the minds of those who are not in the above classes. ❧
an early example of accessibility UI in a cook book.
–November 24, 2019 at 04:00PM
Further, as stated, by merely glancing at the pictorially indicated recipe of the present invention the cook can ascertain at a glance the required ingredients, can ascertain whether such ingredients are on hand, and, if not, the needed articles will be more easily remembered in purchasing the days supply of groceries, etc. ❧
an example in the wild of visual memory being stronger than other forms.
–November 24, 2019 at 04:02PM
The book goes closer to teaching the reader to cook than most modern books. ❧
My thoughts as well. Ratio is a fantastic cooking book.
–November 24, 2019 at 04:04PM
At least one, somewhat successful, cookbook has been published claiming to teach cooking without recipes.40 ❧
Bookmark to read in future: Glynn Christian, How to Cook Without Recipes(London: Portico Books, 2008).
The numbering of the annotations is slightly off here….
–November 24, 2019 at 04:05PM
Most modern cookbook authors claim to meet the conditions for a ‘good recipe’ as described by Elisabeth Luard:42
A good recipe is one that first encourages the reader to cook, and then delivers what it promises. A well-written recipe takes you by the hand and says, don’t worry, it’ll all be okay, this is what you’re looking for, this is what happens when you chop or slice or apply heat, and if it goes wrong, this is how to fix it. And when you’ve finished, this is what it should look and taste like, this is what to eat it with. But above all, take joy in what you do.
In reality, most authors fail to meet the above conditions. It would probably be better if authors tried to match the writing of earlier recipe authors from the first half of the twentieth century when less space was given to fancy illustrations and more words were given to how to cook. ❧❧❧
–November 24, 2019 at 04:09PM
Mount: A cooking technique where small pieces of butter are quickly incorporated in a hot, but not boiling, sauce to give bulk and a glossy appearance. ❧
A definition I don’t recall having ever seen before.
–November 24, 2019 at 04:17PM
The technical term for the zest is the flavedo. ❧
flavedo is a new word to me
–November 24, 2019 at 04:27PM
Gone are the days when cooking skills were handed down through the family. Recipes, which were originally memory aids, have become a set of measures and rules to follow slavishly, whether we understand them or not. And while people have been inspired by up-beat and accessible celeb chefs, they're nearly all restaurant chefs rather than home cooks. The art of cooking, in short, has been lost. How to Cook Without Recipes is all about setting the home cook free. This wonderful little book will teach you to understand the recipes you follow, why they sometimes go wrong, and how to cook independently to make better use of them and invent their own. Glynn Christian begins by taking the reader on a fascinating journey through the history of recipes, and explains how a useful aide memoire became a set of shackles for would be cooks. He explains how to learn to taste, and to understand what ingredients go together, giving you the tools to create your own recipes. And if you still insist on using your cook books, he explains how to 'read' the recipes of the big names where you should take notice of them, and where you should do your own thing. How to Cook Recipes A cook book, in every sense, with taste.
Referred to by Peter Hertzmann in a paper about food communication.
I loved the discussion sparked by What Kind of Knife Do You Use? post. So when Knife Skills Illustrated: A User’s Manual by Peter Hertzmann arrived on my desk, I thought, what great timing. From knife anatomy and care, to proper techniques for cutting vegetables and meats, the book provides a comprehensive guide to that most essential kitchen tool. I spoke to Peter Hertzmann, a self-taught expert on Chinese and French cuisine and the man behind à la carte website, last week in Toronto.
Helen Hou-Sandi (10up)According to GitHub, developers have contributed more than 1,200 Actions to GitHub Marketplace since GitHub Actions was released in beta last year. Our mission to craft tools for content creators — including developers — and our passion for open-source contribution led us to make a solution that uses GitHub Actions to radically streamline and simplify [...]
Helen Hou-Sandí (helen.blog)Remember when we used to read each other’s individual blogs? I miss that.
I not only remember it, but I’ve been actively reliving it by posting everything to my own WordPress site, relying on the power of Webmention for cross-site communication, and reading content with Micropub powered Microsub readers. A quickly growing number of diverse people are doing this too.
If you’re interested, please do come join us and ask how!
Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)I followed several new to me feeds today and then decided—why not share? There may be no other way to rediscover the social network that is blogging.
Jeremy, it’s great to see someone else following peoples’ content directly from their own websites! I was surprised (but maybe not really) to see that some of the feeds you had followed were those from the IndieWeb community! Did you happen to catch Tantek’s talk at WordCamp US (▶️) just before the State of the Word?
Coincidentally, I came to your post while playing some feed reading catch up post-WordCamp US and ran across a status update on Helen’s site:
Remember when we used to read each other’s individual blogs? I miss that.
I noticed one other person (you) had “liked” it and clicked myself down the rabbit hole that led me to your post. There are still apparently some interesting old-school discovery methods on the open web.
If you like following interesting sites, I often find Kicks Condor’s HREFHUNT an great regular source for discovery.
I’m curious what feed reader you use for subscriptions? I wrote a short note the other day about some interesting new developments I’ve been seeing in the feed reader and discovery space.
And last, but not least, I followed both the IndieNews and This Week in the IndieWeb blogs via the main indieweb.org site as part of an effort to get more familiar with that community and technology.
If you’d like a crash course on IndieWeb, particularly as it’s applied within WordPress, I’m happy to donate some time to get you up to speed on the next few steps beyond what Tantek outlined. If you’d like to follow more, I have a following page which has a large number of IndieWeb-related developers, designers, and sites including an OPML file for following many of them quickly.
In any case, welcome to the IndieWeb! I can’t wait to see how your explorations there turn out; I’d love to hear about your experiences in that space. There are a lot of friendly people around to help you get started or chat if you need it.
And thanks again for tacitly sharing your list of RSS sources. I’d bookmarked Weinberger’s book a short while ago and can’t wait to read it. I’m looking at your other links presently.
I recently (sort of) met Warren Ellis and, as a result, have become sadly addicted to his blog, and my family is suffering accordingly. But I am really enjoying it. And I’m sure they’ll get over me some day. Today Warren threw down the gauntlet and posted highlights of his RSS feed, basically th...
Thanks to WordPress Special Projects, which, in their initial email to me, I misread as WordPress Special Circumstances. Which I like better. Christie Wright and Andy Affleck from that team stepped…
Empowering people who are doing cool things, one website at a time.
I slept my way through most of IndieWebCamp Berlin2 this weekend (mostly due to the time zone differential), but in the spirit of the event, I did want to work on a few small hack projects.
I started some research and work into creating a plugin to effectuate making “vias” and “hat-tips” easier to create on my site since I often use them to credit some of my sources. I was a bit surprised not to see any prior art in the WordPress repository. Sadly, there’s nothing concrete to show off just yet. I think I’ve got a clear concept of how I want it to look and what will go into the first simple iteration. It will be my first “real” WordPress plugin, so there’s some interesting learning curve along the way.
On a more concrete front, I made a handful of CSS tweaks and fixes to the site, and particularly to some of my annotation/highlighting related posts, that I’ve been meaning to take care of for a while. Now on read posts where I’ve aggregated some annotations/highlights, the highlighted portions should appear in yellow to better differentiate them in portions of text and represent them as highlights. This prevents me from creating a read post for the content and one or dozens of related, but completely separate, follow-up annotation posts. Now they’re combined, and I think they provide a bit more contextualization for the original, but still include the timestamps for the annotations. I’m sure there’s some more I can do to tweak these, but I like the result a bit better than before. Today’s post about a research paper I read on food is a good example of to highlight (pun intended) some of the changes. Ideas for further improvements are most welcome.
I also slightly tweaked and then further experimented with some of the CSS for my reply contexts. I’ve been considering reformatting them a tad to try to highlight the fact that the content within them is context for my responses. In some sense I’m looking at making the context look more card-like or perhaps oEmbed-esque. I still haven’t gotten it the way I’d ultimately like it, but perhaps one day soon? I played around with changing the size of the context with respect to my content as well as adding some outlines and shadows to make the context look more like cards, but I haven’t gotten things just right. Perhaps some more research looking at others’ sites will help? Which sites do you think do reply contexts incredibly well?
I’m glad there’s a holiday coming up so I can spend a bit of time catching up on some of the sessionsand notes and hopefully see some of the demos from the camp.