Lately, I have been trying to live more in the moment. I am a horrible multi-tasker, but my stubborn compulsion to be continuously productive has more often than not resulted in attempts to juggle several tasks at once, not reaping the benefits of any individual one. I would watch a movie with my laptop in front of me, not absorbing the blog I was looking through or the storyline on the television screen; I would eat breakfast while going through flashcards, usually retaining the information on the flashcards but certainly not fully appreciating the food being shoveled into my mouth. I just find it difficult when there are so many things that I’d like to do, none of which being particularly thrilling on their own, to settle down, sit still, and appreciate them one at a time. It doesn’t help that I am always finding new websites to explore, new blogs to read, and new recipes to bookmark.
Today I’d like to tell you about one of these new websites that I’ve been exploring, one of the reasons why it has proven to be challenging to allocate individual time for each item on my to-do list rather than have 20 tabs open on my browser at once while eating a snack and catching up on the series Glee (which my roommates have recently turned me on to). Anyway, the website is called erecipe.com, and it’s a database not unlike foodnetwork.com or any other pool of food prep info and recipes. I was recently contacted about it, and decided to check it out, explore, and then share my findings with all of you.
Erecipe seems like a fairly new site. I don’t know much about its origins or things so I can’t confirm any of that, but it’s definitely still in the building phase. It will not generate thousands of hits for any search like you can get on Food Network or even FoodBlogs.com – at least not yet. However, I find the website’s premise to be extremely promising, and think that with a little bit of dedication and collaboration, it can turn into a very informative, interactive website.
The recipes that are on there all look delicious. They are user-submitted, so much like a recipe you would pull from Foodblogs.com or another individual blog, you have the added bonus of a recipe that has been tried out by a “real” person and not some test kitchen or professional chef. For someone who is far from a professional herself, I appreciate this. The format of the recipes is also very conducive to understanding the process, with the ability to post pictures for individual steps, include notes and tips to help make the directions easier to comprehend, and a structured way of listing ingredients that eliminates confusion – that is, I’ve seen ingredients lists that call for “1 can of tomatoes,” which is far too vague when you go to the grocery store and are suddenly faced with 5 different sizes.
In addition to recipes, you can also view and post videos. I watched one on assembling Tiramisu, and found it to be very interesting (and appetizing!). All submissions, by the way, go through a moderator before showing up on the site, which removes the risk of a Wikipedia-for-food scenario in which any random person can post any random thing. You can also go to a discussion board for a more interactive approach to cooking – this allows you to ask questions, find tips, and generally just interact with other people out there.
I did submit a recipe for a delicious egg white scramble, and found the process to be intuitive and quick. The recipe was accepted within 12 hours and now appears on the site. The nutrition information that it provides is decent, though still suffers from the over-generalization of ingredients that most free nutrition analyses do. For example, my recipe calls for breadcrumbs, which I encourage to be homemade from preservative-free whole grain bread, but the analysis will go through assuming it’s the store bought, trans-fat laden, high sodium variety. Unless you’re very fastidious when inputting the ingredients (for example, I could have listed “1 slice whole grain bread” and in the directions indicated they should be pulsed into crumbs), you have to look upon the nutritional information with a critical eye.
Overall, I’m looking forward to keeping an eye on how this website progresses and grows, and will certainly be using it more to submit my own recipes. I’d encourage you to check it out (especially my submission! Or am I just biased?) and give it a go – I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with what you find.
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