March 2010

I must admit, we take the cooking and food vocabulary that we use and hear every day for granted. At least, that's the case for me. And so it is for Parmesan as in Parmesan Cheese.

I was playing around with a recipe the other day that called for Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. And I had to pause with a brief pondering question "what's the difference between Parmesan and Parmigiano or Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese"?

It occured to me that I've been buying and using these cheeses for years and I've never stopped to understand the difference. In fact, I've probably been mistaken in my assumption that these are just different names for the same cheese.

Well, to some extent, that may be true, but it's a bit more complicated than that as I've come to learn.

OK, some of you (maybe many of you) are probably saying at this point, this one's pretty obvious. Of course, Parmesan is simply the French version of Parmigiano which is Italian. So are these just the French and Italian language equivalents for the same cheese? Not so fast.

More continous improvements at Family Recipe Central

While some of the adjustments, fixes and enhancements that we make at Family Recipe Central might seem small and insignificant, sometimes these minor improvements make a big difference for our users.

One of the frequent questions submitted to our support team is "how to have duplicate ingredient items" in the ingredients section of a recipe. Seems reasonable enough, but this has been a limitation in our system up until now.

For example, let's say you have a recipe that has two sections, a fish preparation, and a sauce that is served over the fish. You might want your ingredients list to look something like this ...

Ingredients

Fish

• 2 halibut filets
• 1/2 med onion, diced
• 1/2 cup cilantro, chopped
• 1/4 tsp sea salt
• 1 leek, diced

Sauce

• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp fresh ginger, minced
• 2 tbsp rice wine vingegar
• 1/2 tsp sea salt

Previously, the problem that you would bump into has been our limitation on duplicate ingredients. In this case, the sea salt in the Sauce section is flagged as an error because it's a duplicate ingredient entry of the sea salt in the Fish section.