Welcome!

Welcome to the new MetaCookbook! It’s been hard work to redesign it into something beautiful, functional, and more representative of what MetaCookbook has become and where it and I are going.

This has gone from the shared internet space where Bill and I challenged ourselves to cook ~2500 recipes to my blog, somehow, to the space where I, Tasha, accidentally started learning how to cook by trying to cook ~2500 recipes. I haven’t yet hit 200, though I thought I had recently. Wishful thinking.

Recipes and learning to cook aside, though, I’ve had a lot to just plain say about food. So, I’ve said it. I’ve also started showing you how I’m winging it, on occasion. Bill and I are still in discussions about the challenge that started this all.… Continue reading →

Beer is character building. It encourages sharing.

It’s October, which I tend to think of as “PumpkinBeerSeasonHooray!” month. Unfortunately, Pumpkin Beer “season” hit atypically early in Chicago – around August – and I was in no position to go out and sample the breadth of beers I would normally try to sample during pumpkin beer season.

Such is life, and I had hoped that come early October, there would still be a variety (albeit smaller) of pumpkin beers on the shelf. I would get to try maybe three or four new pumpkin beers. It would not be the extravaganza of pumpkin beers I saw in someone I know posted about on Facebook[1], but something.

I could not have been more wrong. By the time I got to Binny’s, they had two kinds of pumpkin beer.… Continue reading →

On History

The blog move is kind of annoying. Making things work in WordPress that worked in Serendipity is surprisingly touchy and difficult. It’ll all be worth it in the end, but it’s seriously obnoxious in the meantime.

Work, computer! Just do what I want! Magically! Magic is how computers work, right?

One of the things I’m having to do is go through and read all the entries and look for coding errors or similar problems. It’s astoundingly slow going. It’s good for mostly-brainless activity, but as I’d like to get this done by the 22nd of October, it’s also something I’ll have to do while I have brainpower. Thus, it’s really dull.

There’s been some upsides, though. The first being that I’m seeing the list of cookbooks we own, and thus recipes I’d been so excited about making & then forgotten.… Continue reading →

Changes are afoot at MetaCookbook!

And they’re going to be super cool changes.

First of all, we’re changing up the software. We’re moving from Serendipity to WordPress. Serendipity has been okay for us, but mostly it just made both of us crazy. Not something we expected when we selected it as a platform, but there’s some things you only discover as you go along.

On top of that, the site’s getting a complete makeover. We may have to spend some time in a transition space, basically Wordress’s default design, until the kinks are ironed out in the makeover design. I hope not, but it’s a possibility based on having to change the software when we did. Basically, if we hadn’t done it now, we were looking at November at the earliest.… Continue reading →

TBWC2C Challenge: Apple-Pumpkin Brown Betty

I’m not quite sure what possessed me to volunteer to be one of the home cooks for Zach and Clay’s Super Awesome Cover to Cover Challenge over at The Bitten Word. I actually almost passed on it. When they first posted it, I could have been somewhere in the first 20 volunteers, I suspect. However, I decided not to, as Bill and I were traveling for most of the cooking time.

When they posted their request for a few more volunteers, I looked at the schedule again. I considered that our vacation rental had a kitchen. And then I said, “Why not?”

Then I got my assignment, an Apple-Pumpkin Brown Betty (APBB). I told Angelique that when I saw the recipe, I was thrilled. You know, in a food hoarder sort of way.… Continue reading →