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MORE than a decade ago, I was confronted with a crisis: planning a week’s worth of menus and writing out the accompanying shopping list were gobbling up a humongous slice of my precious weekend. It stressed me out and caused a bit of marital strife. How, my new husband would ask, could it take me that long to make a list?
My routine was this: On Saturday morning, surrounded by my cookbooks and recipe file, I would make dinner selections for each night of the week, then write a shopping list. While not unpleasant, it consumed most of the morning, and I had yet to even make it to the stores.
Something had to give.
I decided to build a computer database of all of my favorite recipes and use it to generate my weekly shopping list. In other words, I would bring my work skills home.
Even here at The New York Times, which has hundreds of employees skilled in information gathering and technology, my job is at the extreme end of the nerd scale. I spend my days combing through databases — digital collections of public records — in search of evidence to support traditional news reporting. My home recipe project became an extension of that work: a rather high-tech way of doing a task that most people manage with pencil and paper. Think Betty Crocker meets Bill Gates.
For years, I had been saving recipes and recording my favorites in a three-ring binder known as the “blue book.” Now I had to type all those recipes into a computer database and decide how to tag the various dishes and ingredients.
I began by settling on broad categories: breakfast, dessert, entree and side dish. Entrees were further tagged as beef, pork, poultry, pasta, seafood, vegetarian, soup or salad. I tagged side dishes as vegetable or fruit, according to the dominant ingredient. I added other categories for items like cleansers, bath items and paper products — things that I might need to buy but would not turn up in a recipe. When our son arrived eight years ago, I added categories for snacks and other items specifically for him.
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