Results tagged “technology” from Mostly Eating

Supernatural Recipe Search Engine is a new search engine for finding recipes that utilise natural, minimally processed ingredients. It's such a lovely and useful idea that I wanted to write a quick post to let you know about it.

I'm sure many of you will have found your way over to the site already as the Super Natural Recipe Search is the creation of Heidi Swanson of the popular 101 cookbooks site and author of one my favourite cookbooks, Super Natural Cooking.  You can give it a try at www.supernaturalrecipes.com.  The distinguishing feature that really makes it is that the links included are all handpicked right down to the level of the individual recipes, immediately adding a whole heap of value to the results returned. 

Here's what Heidi has written about how the search engine is populated:

"This search engine will not query each of the sites in its index in its entirety. Instead, I went through each site page by page, cherry-picking the recipes I could imagine cooking in my own kitchen - again, the ones highlighting whole grains, natural sweeteners, a wide range of flours, and plenty of fresh produce."

The SuperNatural Search Engine has a number of different widgets so that you can add a search facility to your site; I've added one to Mostly Eating to try it out as I'm sure this will turn into an extremely useful resource as more and more recipes are added.  Now to see if I can find out what to do with that millet I bought...

I’m doing that commute again at the moment and our cooking has been very much of the tried and tested variety, hence the slightly light recipe flow.  I have however been indulging my inner geek and making a few cosmetic and technical tweaks to Mostly Eating.  First of all, I decided it would be fun to have a bit of a seasonal colour theme to go with all of those beautiful autumnal fruits and vegetables we’re going to be cooking with over the next few months.  And then there are a few little technical touches to make the site easier to use:

• Mostly Eating is built on customised installation of Moveable Type, which I love dearly but is let down a little bit by its search tool.  I’ve been trying a few alternatives out over the last couple of months and finally settled on Google site search (I figure everybody knows their way round Google’s search result format!).  You can find the new search on the top right of every page.
• In the old incarnation of this blog I had a tag cloud, something that didn’t make it through the redesign back in February.  I was having a look at my search logs and it seems that a few of you have been missing the tag cloud, so I’ve decided to reinstate it.  You can explore at your leisure later but a popular choice is those recipes that take “less than 20 minutes”.  The tag cloud is also a good way to discover seasonal recipes, through the Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter tags. You can find the tag cloud in the side columns of each page.
• You'll find that there is a neat little Share This button on every post, just at the end of the body of the post and before the comments.  Clicking on the button opens up a huge range of  options for sharing the post with your favourite social media network, bookmarking it for later or emailing it to a friend. 
  
• In the page footer there is a link to my Twitter page.  Fellow Twitter users, it would be great to hear from you if we aren’t following each other already.  Non Twitter users, come over and check Twitter out when you get chance. Twitter is officially Where the party is at and there are lots of friendly food bloggers over there (in fact too many for me to safely list without risking accidentally offending somebody by missing them out!)

This New Scientist article, Snap-happy dieters reap benefits caught my eye recently over at SmarterFitter blog.  The dietitian and nutritionist’s favourite tool, the humble food diary, has been given a technological revamp using the mobile phone camera.

In the study described in the NS article a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recruited volunteers to compare the tried and trusted paper and pen style food diary against recording foods eaten using a mobile phone camera.  The study volunteers felt that their photographic diary was much more useful for understanding and changing their eating behaviours than the paper diary.  In particular, the diary keepers found that taking photos was particularly good at stopping what the researchers termed coyly termed "imprudent snacking". 

Why food diaries work
In the olden days, if your dietitian asked you to keep a food diary it was most likely because he or she wanted you to bring it in for them at a later appointment for them to bash you on the head with it.  "You ate how many biscuits!?!", "surely you can see why you haven't lost any weight yet".  Thankfully such judgemental approaches are long gone and these days he or she may even tell you to keep your food diary to yourself. This is because the power of the food diary is not just in the information recorded therein, but in the act of recording itself.

The normal technique for keeping a food diary is to record everything that you eat and most importantly to record your food before you eat it.  This works in several ways:

• a record of the food you have eaten provides a way to identify patterns in what and when you eat, enabling you to keep the good habits and kick the bad
• the simple act of recording is an instant reality check, particularly where portion sizes are concerned; you get chance to stop and think if you really meant to eat that item of food and to reality check portion sizes
  
• it's a bit tedious noting down everything you eat before you can eat it. Can you really be bothered to go back and get another biscuit if you have to get your notebook out and write it down first?

Why a phone food diary is even better than a notepad

• a picture is an excellent way of documenting exactly what you ate, effortlessly capturing a snapshot of both how much and what
  
• you have your mobile phone with you pretty much all the time, so you can always record before you eat. With a note pad it's tempting to "cheat" and promise to write it down when you get home
  
• photos are far quicker and easier than writing everything down, portion sizes and all
  

So our dishwasher broke a couple of weeks back and I really don’t like washing up, which is ironic considering how much of it I create. It’s NOT therapeutic and it DOES make your hands all wrinkly.

Anyway I thought I’d make the effort and try washing up for a while, to be more eco-friendly y’know. It turns out that I wasn’t being environmentally friendly and that there is much more to this dishwasher business than meets the eye:

It isn’t more eco-friendly to live without a dishwasher
Yay, the best news – washing up by hand uses more water and energy than a dishwasher! If your old dishwasher dies, don’t be sad, it’s not evil to replace him. The biggest study looking into this was carried out by researchers at the University of Bonn in 2004 who showed that modern dishwashers are more water and energy efficient than human washer-uppers from a number of different nations. For all you hand-washers out there, you too can come close to the efficiency of dishwasher by perfecting your dishwashing technique (you can read more about this over at the Guardian website)

New dishwashers are much more energy efficient than older ones
According to the UK Environment Agency our new dishwasher will use around half the amount of water and energy than our old machine bought ten years ago does (or did, before it died).

It’s still eco-friendly even if you use the dishwasher for big stuff like saucepans
I’ve always tut tutted at my other half for filling up our old dishwasher with just a few huge pans and colanders, but it turns out that even washing big items is more energy efficient by dishwasher than by hand. But, get this, the sums only add up if you don’t use extra water rinsing the pans before putting them in. So you get to be doubly lazy and not even rinse the pans, never mind scrub them. This fact made me smile for an entire week.

Some dishwashers are even more eco-friendly than others
We visited a few shops and looked online and found that nearly all new dishwashers have an ‘A’ rating for energy efficiency (meaning that they are very good). Most models use 16 or 18 litres of water per wash but after careful label reading we found one which cost a little bit more but which uses a tiny 12 litres of water per wash (tip: we saved the extra fifty quid this particularly dishwasher cost by getting a really good deal from our little local electrical dealer, who we were suprised to find was much cheaper than the big retail park shops).