Pinboard Cooking Challenge
February 12, 2019 6:21 AM   Subscribe

Pinboard Cooking Challenge
In which I cook and photograph my way through my recipe backlog, and test the limits of one tiny studio apartment kitchen.

Over the last 10–15 years, through multiple changes of internet browsers and life circumstances, I’ve bookmarked over 100 recipes, which eventually found their way to my pinboard.in account. Most of them--125 to be exact--remained uncooked. In late 2018, I decided to change that, and teach myself to photograph food in the process. My goals are to stretch myself as a home cook, learn a bit more about my likes and dislikes, and eat a lot of amazing food.

What you will find on this blog: step-by-step recaps, with photos, of my cooking process; recipe reviews; unvarnished accounts of my kitchen mishaps; ample raving about my new favorite recipes.
What you won't: the recipes themselves; discussion of weight/weight loss; discussion of "healthy" and "unhealthy" food.

Some example recipes:
-Coffee Nut Chicken (I didn't like this)
-Brussels Sprout and Mushroom Lasagna (I loved this)
-Farro and Beet Burgers (I messed this up!)

Here's the recipe list on Google Docs.

A quick note on navigating Medium: you can click the Archive button at the bottom of the page to view older entries.

A quick note on names: this blog is under my real name. I would prefer to keep this connection relatively un-Googleable, so if you could avoid a) mentioning my full name in the comments here, and b) directly mentioning my MeFi username or linking this Projects post over on the blog it would be much appreciated!

And finally, thank you to the good people of Ask Metafilter for helping me brainstorm blog ideas! I didn't use any of the exact suggestions in the post, but something about reading the answers really jogged my brain and made me realize what I wanted to do all along.
Role: creator
posted by capricorn (5 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite

I love this idea and have my own archive of unused recipes in pinboard. I move them to pepperplate as I can and make notes there if I do make something. I should really find a way to share them, though.

I am following your posts in my Feedly now. One thing is that the name of your feed is just "RSS", though I was able to rename it in Feedly. Maybe there is a setting you can change in your Medium account to give your feed a more unique name.
posted by soelo at 7:14 AM on February 12, 2019


Thank you for following! I don't see anywhere to change the name of my RSS feed unfortunately, and nothing in Medium FAQs--would love to hear if anyone on MeFi has found a setting!
posted by capricorn at 8:17 AM on February 12, 2019


Love this and your food photography skills are great!
posted by ellieBOA at 11:57 AM on February 12, 2019


Excellent! Congrats on the blog and for the recaps and documenting the steps you took. Agreed on the terrific photos throughout the process.

Also thank you for using tags on your posts. I love that you do a conclusion at the end with a summary of why you would (or wouldn't) try the recipe again. If I may make a suggestion: perhaps add tags to note which are your favorites? I saw the "fail" tag and would also love to see the equivalent opposite. "Success!" or "Favorite" or "Will make again" to go along with your blog text. Also would be great to see "Quick"... I plan to keep reading future entries, and the additional tags would make it a lot easier to go back and find specific ones as the list keeps growing.

Nice work! Although I'm not much of a cook, I do like to share recipes with friends, and I may try a few of these myself...
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 10:07 PM on February 12, 2019


Brussels Sprout and Mushroom Lasagna

I have the same garlic press! I stopped using it because it sucks to clean, even with the little blue widget it came with for that purpose.
posted by exogenous at 7:43 AM on February 13, 2019


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