Family Recipe Central Blog

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.

Chile peppers add a special flavorful dimension to cooking. Not only just the heat and spice, but a variety of flavor sensation too!

When you visit the grocery market today, you'll find more variety of chile peppers than ever. Some peppers are more on the mild side and other chili peppers pack enough wallop of heat, they can take your breath away.

There's actually an somewhat standard and commonly used method to rate the heat level of chili peppers. Although you may not see these ratings on display at the supermarket, "Scoville Units" are a useful way to classify the various levels of heat from one variety of chile pepper to another.

The Scoville method was developed almost 100 years ago by Wilbur Scoville, a pharmacist,  in 1912. Originally, the method employed human tasters to determine by how much an extract of a pepper's pungency would have to be diluted by sweetened water to neutralize the sensation of heat from the chile peppers on the tongue.

Today, a more modern process is used called "High Performance Liquid Chromotography" (or HPLC) which measures the amount of capsaicinoids (capsaicin) in parts per million. Capsaicin is the compound found in chiles that is responsible for the heat.

For many people, excess sodium in the diet can contribute to high blood pressure and other adverse health effects. The daily recommended sodium intake falls between 1500 mg and 3000 mg, depending on how many calories you consume (about 1,000 mg of sodium per 1,000 calories).

Interestingly, according to the Mayo Clinic, only about 11 percent of the sodium in the average US diet comes from adding salt to the food. The majority of sodium, over 77 percent, comes from eating prepared or processed foods that contain salt. Unfortunately, fast foods are some of the worse offenders when it comes to high salt content (just add salt and you can cover up just about anything).

And even the sodium levels present in the public water supply can vary significantly from one area to the next. Yes, salt intake from just the water we drink. The New York city public water supply has one of lowest sodium levels of sodium in the country and Galveston, Texas has one of the higher levels of sodium (from the public records, not an exhaustive and conclusive study).

Here is a list of common food items with their associated sodium content. Some of the sodium levels in our everyday food may surprise you. For example, canned peas have over 100 times the sodium of raw peas.

Soup to Nuts - now how did that saying get started?

We hear the common colloquialisms, expressions and idioms everyday, and usually just take the words for granted. We're almost numb to their meaning. Do you ever stop to listen to the words, and wonder "where did that expression come from"?

I had that pause the other day when someone mentioned "soup to nuts" in the context of what we were talking about (and I honestly can't even remember what we we're talking about). OK, we know that soup to nuts means everything from A to Z, or maybe more accurately, everything from start to finish.

But just how did the phrase "soup to nuts" come about? In the spirit of the general food interest here at Family Recipe Central, I thought I would "spill the beans" (another shameless food related saying) and dig up the derivation of the expression "soup to nuts".

As you plan and layout your family cookbook, be sure to include plenty of photographs and images. Not only do photographs bring an exciting visual dimension to your recipes, you'll want to capture the memories that family photographs will add to your family cookbook.

A family cookbook is more than a collection of your family recipes. This is your special opportunity to tell the family story and capture your family history. And all of those photographs that you've collected over the years make the perfect addition to your family cookbook.

Here are a few ways to incorporate photographs in your family cookbook

• Recipe and food images
• Family portrait (the family group)
• Portraits and pictures of family members
• Honor the chefs and cooks behind the family recipes with a photo
• Pictures of babies, children and grandchildren
• Pictures of the family pets (how about a funny food story or mishap with a family pet to go along with a picture of your pooch)
• Pictures at the holidays
• Pictures from family vacations
• Pictures from family events and celebrations including family reunions, birthdays, weddings, etc.
• Pictures in the kitchen
• Pictures of the houses and towns where your family has lived

Tell the story with pictures and words.