The Modern Kitchen
The kitchen today is a far cry from the kitchen of yesteryear. The kitchen is no longer a place used simply for cooking. It now serves as an all-purpose centre, the cooking/eating center, gathering place, work area and entertainment spot for the family.
Back in the early eighties when PCs were young, having a PC in the kitchen would have probably illicit a “What on earth for?” It may seem somewhat a silly idea to buy a PC back in 1969 for the price tag of $10 600 just to keep recipes in it, and aptly so!
But with the barrage of affordable PCs and notebooks these days, virtually every home has at least one PC in it. From keeping shopping lists and placing online grocery orders on the internet, to keeping your favourite recipes in a folder on the kitchen PC desktop. A computer also means that the shopping list items are entered before you forget that you’re out of milk, and recipes can be viewed without wrestling a big cookbook, all while checking your email or weather forecast instead of waiting for that pot to boil.
All the better if you’ve got internet connectivity to your PC/notebook in the kitchen. Surfing for that exotic recipe from another culture could just get your creativity juices going and motivate you to try something more adventurous, to food substitutions to exotic spice shopping. The Internet is a vast repository of recipes from plain to fancy. You can obtained a vast variety regional cooking recipes, from soul food in Louisiana to exotic Zanzibar. Often these sites include links to sources for uncommon ingredients, so when the urge strikes to cook up from Penang Laksa, you won\’t be stymied by a lack of bunga kantan, or what frown wondering what exactly it is. The internet is also a vast repository of information for finding substitute ingredients to those far reaching exotic ones you may not have in your area. Or even finding out that Swede is not someone from Sweden but is actually a yellow turnip when written on a recipe, and that castor sugar is fine sugar (but not like icing sugar).
If you’re not that adventurous but is faced with that time classic question when meal time approaches “what shall we have for dinner?” then switch on your PC and search for a simple recipe for a meal other than ordering a home-delivery of pizza.
Another difficulty arises when a recipe uses unfamiliar measurements or ingredient names. When you have a PC in the kitchen, it\’s easy to find metric conversions. Just type “cooking conversions” in a search engine and you’ll have tables and converters that just needs you entering the numbers you need and voila! Instant conversion without having to look for that calculator and still wonder how much you need to subdivide the numbers on.
