American recipes use volumes to measure dry ingredients. Outside the United States, the amount of flour or almonds in a recipe are commonly given in grams, not cups. One uses volume, the other mass. Credit (or blame) for this difference often goes to Fannie Farmer who used cups and spoons for measurements in her The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (first published 1896). Farmer’s book was very popular. The first two editions sold over 300,000 copies.…

I’ve been having fun at a new food and cooking question and answer web site modeled on the the very successful stackoverflow site. The site claims to be in beta, but it is already very polished with a few hundred questions available for browsing. The site is well designed and right now, ad free. To help control spam and trolls, the site has a reputation system, where users that have contributed most to the site get higher reputation scores and are granted editing privileges.…

This spring break, with no detailed planing (we bought the tickets a week from departure), the Mrs and I took a road trip through Andalusia. We started in Madrid, went to Granada, circled to Cordoba and then back to Madrid, stopping when curiosity struck. Being Semana Santa only added to the fun. Molecular gastronomy After the Prado in Madrid, we felt like a snack and walked into a café. The Mrs asked for a torta española, a traditional omelet made with sliced potatoes and onions.…

This site has has moved from Squarespace. The site has a new look. Barely. Squarespace, the company that hosts my blog, has recently upgraded the templates they provide to users. I have tried to make the new template look as much as possible like the old site. Let me know if you find any hard to read areas or just plain weird stuff. The new site has a “Share Article,” button under all posts, which should make it easier for those that use social networking tools.…

For two weeks I had a strange metallic taste in my mouth. It was very strong in the morning, like having an aluminum spoon in my mouth. If I ate a piece of bread or drank a glass of milk, they tasted bitter. Food tasted unpleasant. I had lost the joy of taste! I Googled it and most sites relate the metallic taste to gum problems, but I had just been checked by the dentist.…