three bowls

Even just a cursory scan of this blog makes it clear that I can be a bit obsessive and hyperfocused, but here’s something you might not know: that does translate, at times, into being a geek. 

It could be because my dad’s a computer guy and so I was part of an early-adopting household with a Kaypro in the early ’80’s, and lost many hours to playing Star Lanes and Boulder Dash.

Or maybe it’s just that I really bought into Tomorrowland during early childhood trips to Disneyland, but whatever the origin of the impulse, I am basically all about automating my life.  I am constantly looking for new ways to outsource my brain’s rote activities to a computer.  I have more important things to do with my gray matter!  Like memorize hip hop lyrics and try to remember the names of DOS computer games I played in the early ’80’s!

My latest obsession is finding the perfect recipe database that can help me with this whole Cooking in the Matrix thing.  Maybe at some point, I’ll have an established repertoire of dishes to rely on, say, to use up that big bundle of sage I bought at Trader Joe’s because it was cheap.  But for now, it requires me picking through recipes in books, online, and in magazines without always having a quick and easy way to drill down to something that a) I would actually like, b) would use up the ingredient I want to use up and c) won’t require buying a bunch of new stuff.

Recipe databases are supposed to help keep that kind of thing easy and (my favorite!) are automated.  While I’ve seen some that have great features (like grocery list generation, easy scalability and nutrition/cost estimates), none has been perfect enough to make me want to drop the cash. 

And most of the ones with the best features seemed to be offline tools.  I need something I can access anywhere in the world, from the North (sitting at my actual desk with my desktop) to the South (sitting five feet away on my couch with my work laptop). 

Enter Zoho.  If you haven’t encountered them, like Google, they offer a variety of online business and personal applications like word processing, spreadsheets, databases, etc.  Mainly for free!  (I think if you use them for biz they might cost.)  I’ve used their database creator to make an inventory for the store, so I thought I could maybe do something similar with a recipe database.

Maybe at some point I will make something that complex, but for now, I’ve actually managed to create a (relatively) simple cross-reference-able database just using their word processor called Writer and its tagging function.  (It’s similar to what you could probably do using a blogging platform, but since I’m using other people’s recipes and copyrighted material, I want to keep it private and most password-protected blogging tools cost at least a little each month).  It's online, so I can access it anywhere. 

So any recipes that I had in Word, I just imported into Zoho.

I then added tags (in that bottom gray bar) for the ingredients that I thought I would someday need to cross-reference.  (I don’t add things like olive oil or garlic or anything else I always have on hand and use up regularly before it goes bad.)

I then have three different ways to use this.  Let’s say I’m in a recipe that uses that sage, and I want some ideas for other things I can make that week that will use up the rest of the sage. 

I can simply click on the tag and it pops up a little window showing me what else is tagged with that:

If I click that “Add as Folder” designation when I add the tag in the first place or any time that window is up, it creates a folder off to the left of the workspace for that tag.  So if I’m not already in a recipe or open Zoho with the ingredient in mind first, I can click on the folder, in this example, Sage, to see the recipes listed in that folder that use that (any recipe tagged with Sage is automatically added to that folder).

And of course, I can do a basic search of all the files, although it does seem to bring each result up twice for some reason.

So far, I’m loving it!  I can’t scale, or make a quick grocery list, but this cross-referencing this is really the most important to me.  In addition to quickly copying and pasting in recipes I find online, I’ve been scanning in some recipes I’ve been wanting to try from my stack of cookbooks, converting those to text (while this is a little bit of extra work, it’s actually not that much and will ultimately be less annoying than my current process of poking around aimlessly in every book I own).  And since I am currently between projects at work and have some downtime, I am preparing for some serious geeking out time over the next few days.