Digital food

This article was originally going to be about something else. I was going to do a quick catchup on some of the things I’ve been reading lately, but When I was going through the list of books, I got diverted by Cooking with Spices by Mark Stevens.  I think this was the book where I came to the conclusion that cookbooks and other practical books for the kitchen just don’t work as e-books.

I’ve been using my iPad and/or Kindle as my primary reading tool for a good 6-7 years now.  I love the portability of ebooks, I love being able to carry my entire library around with me, I love that I have whatever I want at my fingertips at the gym, on a bus, at a restaurant, as my desk during lunch, and so on.  I almost never buy any paper books any more with two exceptions.

Books that rely on photographs or other artwork really need the space of a genuine physical book, and cookbooks just don’t work electronically.  I’ve tried.  I have a few books I’ve purchased as ebooks and the ones I like the best I’ve purchased as physical books (I’ll talk about them in a future article).  And as much as I’ve tried, I’ve concluded that electronic cookbooks are more trouble than they are worth.

With Cooking with Spices, I really enjoyed  being able to browse through it easily on the bus on the way to work, but then I came across a spice blend I thought was interesting.  Actually, it was a group of five or six out of a group of a dozen blends I wanted to note.  There is no easy way to do this.  With a real cookbook, I know I can open the book, flip a reasonably accurate number or pages, and get there.  Or I can fold down a corner of the page.  Or I could stick on a post-it.  You get the idea.

With an ebook, none of that is possible. I open up the Kindle app, back navigate out of the book I’m reading, find the cookbook I need, and then have to flip pages to get to what I want to see, and, by the way, flipping through pages doesn’t let me see what I’m flipping through the way flipping through a physical book does.

So I’ve decided that I’m not going to get any more cookbooks as ebooks.  I like to think of myself within shouting distance of the cutting edge, but in the kitchen I’m still something of a luddite.

Although not a complete luddite and I have experimented with a variety of culinary apps.  To continue the stream of negativity that I’ve started, I’ve tried a half-dozen grocery list apps and haven’t liked any of them.  They all seem to take too much effort to create a shopping list and then to clear it and start over the next time.  I don’t know why this is so difficult, but it appears to be a major issue.

My low-tech solution is to have a magnetic whiteboard attached to my refrigerator.  As I discover I need things, I write them on the whiteboard. Before heading off to the grocery store, I take a picture of my whiteboard and that becomes my shopping list.

I do have a recipe manager app. There are probably hundreds of these, but I downloaded Paprika a few years ago and it works just fine.  I assume that there might be others just as good, but I like this one and have learned to live with it.

The app is great for storing and classifying recipes and does a very nice job of scanning the web and bringing web recipes into the database.  It’s not quite so convenient for recipes that need to be manually entered, such as recipes that you’ve gathered from magazines (remember magazines?) or your mother’s index card collection.  That process is still a little clunky.

However, having a recipe manager app that you actually use can be very useful.  Last weekend I was shopping for groceries and decided to buy some lamb.  I wanted to use a sauce I’d used for lamb successfully several times in the past and I was able to look up the recipe on my phone to see if there were any ingredients I’d have to buy.  It turned out I did need some plain, thick yogurt and saved myself from having to return to the store later that day.

Some day I’ll have all the key recipes I need permanently stored in my head, but until that happens, it is very convenient to have my favorite recipes just a few taps away.