4 ms·

Not exactly, but i definitely travel through a subloop of this chart. I often buy things at the grocery store that i want to eat in general, but specifically.

Not exactly, but i definitely travel through a subloop of this chart. I often buy things at the grocery store that i want to eat in general, but specifically. Bananas area good example. I love bananas but when it comes to grabbing one in the morning there is like a mental block about it, so eventually the bananas go bad.... What somebody needs to do is create a "No Ingredient Left Behind" product that will yell at you to east the tomatoes before they go bad.

kd0amg 16y ago
My house has, on occasion, toyed with the idea of making a piece of software to keep track of what we have on hand and match it with dishes that would use these ingredients, but it always seems like keeping the inventory up to date would be a large enough component of the work that it's not worth doing.
- sophacles 16y ago
  So if you are willing to be anal enough to make sure things are always "in thier place" and have a few webcams to spare, you could have the webcams point at the food storage locations. This could do a large part of the inventory management automatically... at least have a "present/not present" bit for ingredients.
- calvarez 16y ago
  Is the primary problem that you're out of ingredients and don't realize it, or that you see a bunch of ingredients and aren't sure what to do with them?
  - kd0amg 16y ago
    Both are actually pretty frequent, but with a grocery store a block or so away, the latter is more of a problem. The current instance is chicken broth, a baguette, and spinach (and I returned home this afternoon to discover that somebody had bought more spinach), which are probably just going to get used for separate dishes.
- joh6nn 16y ago
  this works out a little better if you go shopping with recipes in mind. that way, as the days/weeks go by, and you're looking at the food on the shelves, you already know at least one recipe that they can be used for. this might be a little harder to keep working for an entire household (eg, someone doesn't get the memo that a particular ingredient is for a particular recipe), but that's perhaps something that can be solved internally
mechanical_fish 16y ago
I will tell you the secret to bananas: A banana muffin recipe. Once bananas are overripe you can still make muffins from them. Once they are really quite overripe, you can put them in the fridge for several more days, and then you can still make muffins from them. I haven't yet reached the point where I took the overripe bananas, peeled and crushed them, put the crushed banana in containers and froze them, then thawed them two weeks later and made muffins from them... but I bet that would work. Once the muffins are made, they freeze nicely. Thaw them on a plate in the microwave: about 45 seconds per muffin at about power level 40%. The more general secret to small-batch cooking is: Aim to use the freezer. (For example: I have friends who apparently went through decades of life without realizing that bread freezes pretty well -- fresh is better but frozen is not bad. Don't ever let your bread grow stale unless you have the desire to make croutons.)

kd0amg 16y ago

My house has, on occasion, toyed with the idea of making a piece of software to keep track of what we have on hand and match it with dishes that would use these ingredients, but it always seems like keeping the inventory up to date would be a large enough component of the work that it's not worth doing.

sophacles 16y ago
So if you are willing to be anal enough to make sure things are always "in thier place" and have a few webcams to spare, you could have the webcams point at the food storage locations. This could do a large part of the inventory management automatically... at least have a "present/not present" bit for ingredients.
calvarez 16y ago
Is the primary problem that you're out of ingredients and don't realize it, or that you see a bunch of ingredients and aren't sure what to do with them?
- kd0amg 16y ago
  Both are actually pretty frequent, but with a grocery store a block or so away, the latter is more of a problem. The current instance is chicken broth, a baguette, and spinach (and I returned home this afternoon to discover that somebody had bought more spinach), which are probably just going to get used for separate dishes.
joh6nn 16y ago
this works out a little better if you go shopping with recipes in mind. that way, as the days/weeks go by, and you're looking at the food on the shelves, you already know at least one recipe that they can be used for. this might be a little harder to keep working for an entire household (eg, someone doesn't get the memo that a particular ingredient is for a particular recipe), but that's perhaps something that can be solved internally

mechanical_fish 16y ago

I will tell you the secret to bananas: A banana muffin recipe. Once bananas are overripe you can still make muffins from them. Once they are really quite overripe, you can put them in the fridge for several more days, and then you can still make muffins from them. I haven't yet reached the point where I took the overripe bananas, peeled and crushed them, put the crushed banana in containers and froze them, then thawed them two weeks later and made muffins from them... but I bet that would work. Once the muffins are made, they freeze nicely. Thaw them on a plate in the microwave: about 45 seconds per muffin at about power level 40%. The more general secret to small-batch cooking is: Aim to use the freezer. (For example: I have friends who apparently went through decades of life without realizing that bread freezes pretty well -- fresh is better but frozen is not bad. Don't ever let your bread grow stale unless you have the desire to make croutons.)