Practicum - Eric (3)

So I spent a considerable amount of time on Allrecipes.com over spring break. It was the perfect opportunity, because since I was at home, I had a nice big kitchen with all sorts of supplies to use. And I had the rest of my family to cook for, too, so my options for recipes were a little bigger than normal. I ended up using the website to find 2 different recipes, and I cooked each of them. The first was for a pork chop marinade that included brown sugar, lemon juice, and onion, among other things. The pork turned out delicious, and I added the recipe to my recipe box. The second recipe I cooked was for homestyle mac n cheese. This didn't turn out quite so well. I followed the recipe with precisely, but the cheese sauce ended up very runny and not overly flavorful. This did allow me, however, to provide constructive feedback on the recipe (which had mostly positive reviews, surprisingly). I didn't take any pictures of either of the meals, because I forgot with the pork, and the mac n cheese didn't even look very nice.

In other news, I spent some time analyzing the discourses used on Allrecipes.com. The first thing that is unsurprising about how information is presented on the website is that nearly all the recipes I've viewed follow the same general format. This is, ingredients in a list form, followed by directions in step format. I did see a few recipes stray from this format, but they weren't overly popular recipes and didn't have very good reviews. No surprise there. Also, these recipes that strayed from typical format strayed from traditional cooking/recipe vocabulary. Obviously there is a certain amount of flexibility in the words used in recipes, but all of the popular recipes used typical words or phrases like mix, stir in, bake, etc. There is a bit of special knowledge necessary to understand some more advanced recipes, with special ingredients or steps, such as creaming butter and sugar. This is the type of thing that only somewhat seasoned cooks or bakers would understand. Allrecipes bails out the uninformed chef, however, with their handy article section with search included. So overall, there is some specific jargon required to use allrecipes successfully, but the website has the tools to be usable by any English-reading individual.