Family Recipe Central Blog

Are you surprised? Didn't know today (April 30th) is National Oatmeal Cookie Day? That's OK, you're probably not alone. Unless you're really tuned into oatmeal cookies.

It turns out, almost every day of the year is a food holiday of one type or another. Interestingly enough, many food holidays are actually proclaimed by the President of the United States.

For example, our US Congress, by Senate Joint Resolution 193, designated March 6th (in 1984) as "Frozen Food Day", and requested the President, then Ronald Reagan, to issue a proclamation for this occasion.

In Proclamation #5157, President Ronald Reagan declared: "Now, therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim March 6, 1984, as Frozen Food Day, and I call upon the American people to observe such day with appropriate ceremonies and activies". And so it goes ...

Now, you probably won't track down an official proclamation for "National Oatmeal Cookie Day" by a US president. However, this food holiday has been celebrated for many years, and there is plenty of documentation to support that National Oatmeal Cookie Day does really exisit.

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.

We've just added several new get-started guides all about how to create your family cookbook.

If you're wondering how to use the cookbook and recipe publishing system at Family Recipe Central to create your family cookbook, be sure to see these helpful tutorials ...

We've made a few adjustments to the Recipe editing module at Family Recipe Central that our users will want to know about.

Recipe Ingredients - Reordering the Ingredients List

The inability to re-order the items in the recipe ingredients list has been a frustrating limitation on our system. After you put your recipe ingredients in and save the recipe, you may want to change the order of one or more of the ingredients in the list. Worse, if you update an ingredient such as fixing a spelling mistake or rewording the ingredient description, the system will change the order of the updated ingredient in the list, usually moving the item to the end of the list.

We're currently working on an update release that will include a number of enhancements to the recipe ingredients list including a drag-and-drop interface to easily reorder the list.

In the meantime, we've provided an interim solution that makes it possible to reorder the ingredient list.

Pizza is definitely a popular convenience food. And while it may seem easier to have that pizza delivered from your local pizza shop, you may not realize that homemade pizza dough is really not that difficult to prepare.

If you're a pizza fan, nothing quite compares to a fresh, homemade pizza!

See our newly added "Glossary of Cooking Terms" under the "Help" section at Family Recipe Central. It's a modest collection of cooking terms at the moment, with about 60 entries or so.

We'll continue to add cooking terms and definitions on an ongoing basis, but it's a nice start to kick off the section.

Once you start entering and keeping your recipes online at Family Recipe Central, you'll find that printing your recipes on recipe index cards is simple and convenient. I must confess, as much as I really appreciate working with recipes online, I still prefer to read recipes from a printed copy while cooking in the kitchen.

For the environmentally conscious, if you're committed to saving the trees, then by all means, you can bring your notebook computer into the kitchen and refer to your recipes online as you cook. But there's something familiar and comfortable about keeping recipes in journals, index cards, or just piles of scrap paper (although, that gets pretty disorganized).

Of course, with a little bit of improved technology, we're all about solving the hard-copy recipe chaos!

At Family Recipe Central, we suggest a "best of both worlds" solution. You can manage your recipes online with all the convenience and facility to share, collaborate and organize your recipes. And keeping your recipes online provides easy access to your recipe collection no matter where you happen to be. For the kitchen, when it's time to cook, with the push of a button, print any recipe in a clear, beautifully formatted 4x6 inch or 5x8 inch index card, as well as a full 8½ by 11 inch page if you prefer.

Printing your recipes on standard index cards is pretty economical too. No expensive special photo paper necessary for your ink-jet or laser printer needed, just ordinary standard index cards that you can find at any office supply including Staples or Office Depot. At last check, a 500 pack of 5x8 inch plain (not ruled) index cards was about $10. That's about 2 cents a card.

We like to use 5x8 inch index cards. They're large enough to contain a more detailed recipe on a single card, yet still convenient to store in a recipe file box or small 5x8 inch 3 ring binder (more about that in a moment).

Most ink-jet and laser printers today can easily print 5x8 index cards. Similar in size to photo paper, index cards typically load into an adjustable printer tray. And some printer models allow a 5x8 index card to be fed individually, similar to an envelope single feed.

At 2 cents per card, you can afford to print a fresh copy if you spill some sauce on your recipe index card while you're cooking in the kitchen. But we like to protect the index cards with the thin plastic film protectors you see in the pictures below. A 25 pack of 5½ x 8 inch top loading plastic sheet protectors runs about $5. You can protect 2 recipe index cards per sleeve (front and back), so it's quite affordable. If you spill something on the sleeve, it easily wipes off clean with a paper towel.