Leaping Potatoes

At various times in my life I have saved recipes on index cards, in small ring-binder notebooks, and loose pieces of paper, hand-written or cut out of magazines or off packages. But nowadays I keep all my recipes in Word documents in a folder on my hard drive called "Cookbook."

I have tried recipe software for my PC and my iPad, and I don’t like any of them. So, all recipes, old and new, live in my computer. When I want one, I print it out.  When I’m done, I throw it away; I can easily print it again. If a new recipe disappoints, I delete it.

There are a couple dozen documents in my “Cookbook” folder, dividing the many recipes into culinary categories such as seafood, biscuits and rolls, soups and stews, casseroles, etc.

The category with the fewest recipes (5) is for condiments and garnishes. The biggest collections are for appetizers and snacks (45), cakes and muffins (34), and meat and poultry (36). By far the largest collection, however, is cookies and candy, which provides recipes for 68 delights.

Another big one is for vegetables, comprising 49 recipes. Or, at least it did until this morning. I have separated it into two: one for potatoes (39) and one for all other vegetables (10).

Okay, I love potatoes. I can’t think of anything you could do to a potato that I wouldn’t like, with the obvious exception of mixing it up with something repulsive.

I would not even be able to say what is my favorite potato preparation. I like them fresh, frozen, and canned, white, red, and yellow, whole, sliced, diced, chunked, grated, and pulverized, boiled, broiled, baked, pan fried, deep fried, grilled, sautéed, steamed and roasted, in soup, in stew, en casserole, and manufactured into chips, crisps, and sticks.

I believe that in another life I starved to death during the Irish potato famine. That’s why I can never get enough potatoes.

It’s Leap Day today, which I think we should celebrate. By eating potatoes.

Participation

I got an email last week from a dude who says his name is Christopher Wienberg and that he is a doctoral student at USC who is researching the experiences of people who write about their everyday lives on the web. "Your weblog came to my attention," says he, and he would like me to participate in his research.

He provided all kinds of contact information, including the email address of his adviser, so I figured it was legit and decided to partake. I took a short survey, and Christopher is going to analyze what I write "using natural language processing technology" (the kind companies use to search their employees' emails for dirty words) in an attempt to correlate my survey responses with what I write about in this here blog thing.

I don't quite get what he's after.  He wants to see "how the thoughts and experiences written by people like you on weblogs ... can be used to make conclusions about society as a whole." Okay, well, good luck with that.

I suppose this is what sociology majors are doing these days to stay trendy. I don't know if I want to hear what he concludes about me or not.