ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, February 21, 1996 TAG: 9602210009
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRED TASKER/KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Home cooks: It's time to overcome your cyber-phobia and learn to love the Internet. It can do marvelous things for you, even if you're a technological turkey and a clumsy cook to boot.
Now, don't panic. We, unlike all those other writers, are going to be concrete here. We're going to go slowly, and we're going to define each term as we use it.
I know, I know. Tthe Internet seems like a bottomless soup of data bits. But relax. Surfing the net for food info is easier than it sounds. I had never spent a minute on the Internet until recently, and in two days at a computer terminal, I was able to find thousands of recipes, restaurant reviews, articles about chefs, tips on dining etiquette, food trivia games, chat lines to gab electronically with other users, and lots more. It was almost as much fun as Space Invaders.
First term definition: The Internet is merely a few million phone lines (or fancier lines like fiber-optic cables) linking computers in homes and businesses around the world. All you have to do is ask it questions, and it will open up to you that whole world of information.
Possibilities range from the mundane to the ridiculous.
Mundane example: There's nothing in the house but cornmeal and chicken, and you've got to make dinner. You just tap the words ``cornmeal'' and ``chicken'' into one of the information sites on the Internet, and it will fill your computer screen with a recipe for chicken pie with cornmeal crust.
An information site, by the way, is a single database of information put on the Internet by a company or an individual. You tap into it, it tells you what you want to know.
Ridiculous example: You're browsing the Internet and you come upon a group of information sites labeled ``Spam.'' Scratching your head, you enter one of them and find a database containing literally thousands of haiku - those 17-syllable, unrhymed Japanese poems - about Spam.
The Internet still is far from omnipotent. Someday, you may be able to get instant expert advice from the Internet on rescuing your dinner. Not yet.
The Internet today is like a Model A Ford. What you see it do seems miraculous compared to what went before. But you also perceive that it is incredibly primitive compared to what it will become.
Right now, you can get into the Internet for food information in two ways:
You can spend up to $30 for a floppy disk and $10 to $25 in monthly access fees to be linked with the World Wide Web, which includes more than 90 percent of all the information sites on the Internet.
Or you can get a free floppy disk and pay $5 to $10 in monthly access fees (plus extra if you use it more than 10 hours or so a month) to be linked with one of the three main commercial services - America Online, CompuServe or Prodigy, which provide their own information sites. These often offer easier ways of getting information and slicker, more colorful graphics. Oh, and the three commercial services will also help you link up with the World Wide Web, so you've got everything covered.
Let's look at each in order.
World Wide Web
There are three ways to look for information here: ``http'' addresses (called URLs, for Uniform Resource Locators), tables of contents and ``home pages.''
Type in the address http:/www.microserve.net/hershey/kitchens.welcome.html and you will reach an information site put on the Internet by Hershey's Chocolate. You get recipes plus a feature that's popular on many information sites - ``FAQs'' or ``frequently asked questions.''
If you don't have an ``http'' address, the Web also will let you open a little ``search screen'' and simply type in the name ``Hershey's,'' and will then give you a list of every information site that prominently mentions that name.
Small awkwardness here: I plugged in ``Dole'' in search of pineapple recipes and got a list of 88 sites about Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and only 12 about the fruit company. Still, I did get my recipe.
Where do you get the ``http'' addresses? Newspaper and magazine ads, friends, word of mouth, even the labels of spaghetti sauce jars.
Another place to find http addresses (and a lot more) is something called YAHOO. YAHOO might be called a table of contents for the Internet: It lists thousands of http addresses on topics from art to zoology, including food. You can find YAHOO by typing http://www.yahoo.com. Then go to the food category, and you'll find all those other http addresses. (YAHOO isn't the only such table of contents. Others include Global Network Navigator and Einet Galaxy.)
YAHOO also serves as a ``home page,'' because it contains, in its food category, a long list of food topics listed not by http address but by simple names like ``Sally's Kitchen,'' ``Jayne's Food Page'' and even alphabetical food categories with topics from corn to pancakes to, yes, those pages on Spam.
Click your mouse on pancakes, and you get recipes from creamed corn flapjacks to reibekuchen, a potato pancake submitted by a German woman named Christa Keil. Click on ``Jayne's Food Page'' (you can also reach this via the address http://www.geopages.com/TheTropics/2063/hobfood.html) and you get another home page (yes, you can find ``home pages'' within home pages; many home pages list others on the same topic, so you can simply click on their name and go to them directly. You don't need to know the ``http'' address.).
At ``Jayne's Food Page'' your computer screen fills with icons (little word-and-photo logos); click on the icons to open up a dozen other information sites. Some of these are really neat. For example:
``Epicurious'' (which can also be reached via http://www.epicurious.com/epicurious/ home.html) is an information site created by Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines. It's huge, with recipes from 30 years' worth of the two magazines. It also has the Essential Restaurant Guide to 10 major U.S. cities.
The Ketchum Kitchen, address http://www.recipe.com is a commercial Internet site with three sections: What's Cooking focuses on daily recipes; Fresh This Week includes seasonal recipes and celebrity chefs to whom net users may e-mail questions, and Dear Sandy lets users send questions and comments to Sandy Hu, who created the service.
America Online
The information site I liked best is The electronic Gourmet Guide (eGG). Yeah, it's spelled with a small e. I don't know why. But one thing you learn on the Internet is that if they use a small e, you have to use one, too, or you won't be able to get their stuff.
The eGG is really a home page, but it calls itself an ``electronic magazine,'' or ``e-zine,'' and it is set up much like a magazine, with indexes and features. The eGG, by the way, can be reached directly through the World Wide Web if you don't have America Online. But the AOL version seems to have more choices, more graphics.
Other neat features provided by eGG include Cooking at Home, with recipes by Miami Herald columnist Linda Gassenheimer (and wine suggestions by, ahem, Miami Herald Wine Columnist Yours Truly), and Food Line, including a Dictionary of Desserts with 86 recipes listed alphabetically, from almond pear cake to zuppa Inglese. The AOL Cooking Club also offers America's Great Chefs Online.
Kitchen Conference Room is an AOL ``chat line'' that lets you gossip with other Internet users by typing short messages on the screen and waiting for replies. It also has structured cooking classes by experts; a recent listing included a bread baking class by Lois Conroy, author of ``Bread Machine Magic,'' at 10 p.m. one Tuesday. The AOL Cooking Club also has ``message boards'' where amateur cooks exchange hints. One problem with such tips, of course, is that their value depends entirely on whether the cooks know what the heck they're talking about.
Prodigy
If you click on this commercial service's ``Home & Family'' icon, you can access a Food Bulletin Board edited by John Mariani, restaurant reviewer for Esquire. We also found a chat line. And Prodigy's Travel section has a Mobil Travel Guide that includes a directory of restaurants in several large U.S. cities.
Compuserve
This commercial service has a Better Homes Kitchen area listing prize-winning recipes from Better Homes and Gardens magazine's contests. Its Breads and Cookies section has recipes for fudge brownies and walnut rolls and articles on using margarine in cookie baking and how to store yeast bread dough before cooking it.
CompuServe also has the Zagat Restaurant Guide, including brief reviews of restaurants. It inexplicably lists, in its ``Notable Newcomers'' category, Miami's Big Fish Restaurant.
Tommy Sykes would've got a guffaw out of that. He opened The Big Fish in a converted gas station on the Miami River in 1982; it closed last February when he died, at 75.
It just goes to show that, whether you're on paper or online, you must stay on top of the news.
Check out The Roanoke Times Online at http://www.infi.net/roatimes
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