Food meets MicroSoft

[Anna N]

An article in yesterday's The Globe and Mail (Saturday, August 26, 2006) discusses the use of spreadsheets to plan wardrobes, catalogue media collections, etc. But I found this one to be quite fascinating.

San Diego computer programmer Howie Wang uses Excel for the Thanskgiving dinner he prepares for 24 guests on a two-burner stove.

spreadsheet cooking

Does anyone else do this?

I would post a link to The Globe and Mail but it is now a subscription service.

[Chufi]

I'm no Excel wizard, but yes I do something similar when I have large parties to plan. For instance when I helped organize and cater a friends wedding (120 guests), my spreadsheet-schedule was a neccessity! They asked for a print and pasted it into their photo-album

[Anna N]

I'm no Excel wizard, but yes I do something similar when I have large parties to plan. For instance when I helped organize and cater a friends wedding (120 guests), my spreadsheet-schedule was a neccessity! They asked for a print and pasted it into their photo-album 

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WOW! I am impressed. I am determined to become a bit more efficient with Excel so I can do some menu planning and track some recipes.

[Swisskaese]

Pre-excel, my father created a shopping list and timetable to be used for several holidays:

Thanksgiving

Passover

Rosh Hashanana/Yom Kippur

It was a great help.

I created an excel sheet for my wedding invitations, thank you notes and gifts

[Jay Francis]

Here are two uses I found for spreadsheets.

I shop for my family and my mother-in-law. I get a list of veggies and fruits from her caretaker and go to our farmer's market. I created a spreadsheet showing all of the aisles of the farmer's market and which fruits and vegetables are located where. When the shopping lists come in, with no particular order, I transfer the needed items and quantities to my spreadsheet and then just roll through the market very quickly.

My other spreadsheet was created to compare the ingredient for Mole Negro as they show up in 10 different cookbooks. Columns and rows list ingredients and quantities.

[mrbigjas]

Pre-excel, my father created a shopping list and timetable to be used for several holidays:

Thanksgiving

Passover

Rosh Hashanana/Yom Kippur

It was a great help.

I created an excel sheet for my wedding invitations, thank you notes and gifts

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yeah, pre-excel, my parents-in-law created a large notebook with shopping lists and timelines for christmas or thanksgiving or other large dinner parties. they still use them today; they include instructions like when to put the baby in for a nap in the midst of planning.

of course that baby is my wife now...

[barolo]

I would post a link to The Globe and Mail but it is now a subscription service.

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Here's a link, Anna: Stressed? busy? Excel-erate your life

After a week it moves to a subscription-based service.

I think I'll stick to lists myself.

[Kent Wang]

Direct link to the guy's blog.

I could definitely see this as being useful for really big meals. The guy's Thanksgiving dinner doesn't look so complicated, though. I feel that I could swing that without a spreadsheet.

[Eden]

I do this all the time for really large meals, but my system is a little different. I have a column for each dish, and then color code based on when it is on the stove/oven etc. So red is always for the oven, yellow is the stove top, purple is the food processor etc.

I also include a column for what serving dish I'll use for each recipe, and in the early planning stages I track colors tastes & consistencies to make sure I don't have a course that's all vinegary dishes or all brown foods etc.

[tino27]

I also use both a word processor and spreadsheet software (open-source equivalent -- OpenOffice) to do very similar things, including pricing certain dishes that clients may want at their event. Plus, with the benefit of the spreadsheet, I can scale up or down very easily in terms of both cost and amount of raw ingredients I need.

But, I've taken this to the next level of geekdom. Once I have my time schedule figured out, I then send a copy of it along with my ingredient list to my BlackBerry, where I can peruse and fine tune the lists whenever I fancy.

[jgm]

I've done something similar to this for holiday meals, but it's because we have one meal a year --either Thanksgiving or Christmas-- at my father-in-law's house. It's an eight-hour drive away, and we usually arrive late the night before the holiday, and there's no time to shop. And he lives in one of those little towns where they roll up the sidewalks at 6 p.m.

My father-in-law's kitchen is only somewhat stocked and equipped, so I take all ingredients and cooking equipment that I'll need. In Excel, I list across the top: DISH (meaning pumpkin pie, vegetable, turkey, etc.), INGREDIENT, INGREDIENT QUANTITY, TOOLS, and TASKS. It helps me plan certain tasks, such as mixing the sugar with the spices for the pumpkin pie, and taking the exact quantity in a plastic bag, instead of taking the spices in their containers, and measuring them on the day of cooking. I can also do a sort on INGREDIENT to deal with ingredients that are in more than one dish, and easily find the total amount I'll need to take.

One of the best things about these lists, is that I can adapt them from year to year, and not start from scratch. My FIL is a great guy, but has his own way of doing things, and as he ages, his way gets stranger and stranger. Last year, we arrived on Christmas Eve, to find out that every potato in the house had been incorporated into potato salad, so there would be no mashed potatoes and gravy with the turkey. And of course, it was dreadful potato salad, too. As we lay in bed on Christmas night, I said to my husband, "Next year, we will get control of the entire dinner, including the potatoes." Unfortunately, my FIL's health has declined enough this year that it will be a necessity. We'll probably even be bringing the turkey and stuffing this time, and the spreadsheet will be a lifesaver.

[Dana]

I do the plasitc bag thing as well, when having to take items to be prepared on site. We often rent a home - beach or mountain- and cook out meals there. Taking just the amount you need is really a time/space/life saver.

I don't make a spreadsheet on my computer - I'm just not that literate, but I do make handwritten lists, including cooking and serving vessels. I tape it up on the cabinet so that it doesn't get food-stained. I don't save it from time to time, though. Making this list is part of the fun!!!

[FabulousFoodBabe]

I've never gone to color-coding, myself, but I do something like this for anything more than 12 people (old catering habit).

I have a binder with the schedule, backed up by a copy of the recipe/method, and then the master grocery list, by vendor. I can't imagine not working with it, even for the things I've done many times. Equipment lists for when you're cooking out of your own house are critical. It amazes me how many people don't have some stuff, like whisks (can't you just use a fork?) and spatulas (I've got a pancake turner right here ...).

[mizducky]

Hi, I'm Ellen and I'm an Excel addict.

Seriously. I use Excel for keeping track of all kinds of random detail-y crap in my life, including food stuff. Not necessarily Thanksgiving--when I used to do a big meal regularly, I had the routine of what goes on when so ingrained from my childhood (I often was the one who wound up stuffing the turkey and sewing it shut at oh-dark-thirty) that I don't really need any kind of list for that. But I have often used a sheet for working out the budget, shopping lists, and process for other large food extravaganzas I've been involved in. For extended camping trips it's especially helpful--there's nothing like the massive bummer of having to make an early return back to civilization because you miscalculated and bought too little of some necessity for your full week out in a particularly remote corner of the great outdoors.

And most recently, I have been spreadsheeting my entire healthy-eating regimen. I have Excel files tracking my daily food intake for the past six months, plus another sheet recording my weekly and cumulative weight loss, complete with a graph of my progress. I also have occasionally used Excel for non-food-related health data such as tracking blood pressure readings and etc.

(And I do also use it heavily for my work--tracking contract hours and activities, expenses, etc etc etc.)

Edited August 28, 2006 by mizducky (log)

[MarketStEl]

I keep track of time spent on freelance work where I bill by the hour on Excel, but I hadn't gotten to the point where I do grocery lists on it yet.

But y'know, it does sound appealing. And I've got to do the buying for a large party/cookout this coming Saturday. It might not be a bad idea to draw up the list on Excel, then print it out and take it to 9th Street with me.

[Andrew Fenton]

Seems like the next logical step would be to use Google Spreadsheets for collaborative meals.

[HeatherM]

Early this year I had promised to make sweets (truffles and cookies) for a friend's wedding. Things got a bit complicated when I also moved and started a new job in the month before the wedding.

I guess Excel would have worked well, but since my last few jobs have been as a project manager, I headed for MS Project to schedule my time. It worked out fairly well in that I could easily see when I was going to run into scheduling problems, and was able to juggle my schedule around to get everything done.

I guess that's probably geekier than Excel , but I think that I may try Excel for meal planning (which I do need to start doing).

[mizducky]

Early this year I had promised to make sweets (truffles and cookies) for a friend's wedding.  Things got a bit complicated when I also moved and started a new job in the month before the wedding.

I guess Excel would have worked well, but since my last few jobs have been as a project manager, I headed for MS Project to schedule my time.  It worked out fairly well in that I could easily see when I was going to run into scheduling problems, and was able to juggle my schedule around to get everything done.

I guess that's probably geekier than Excel , but I think that I may try Excel for meal planning (which I do need to start doing).

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I have used, or perhaps more accurately, done battle with MS Project a few times back when I actually worked for The Big Soft. Admittedly a powerful tool once you succeed in beating it into submission, but not one of their more user-friendly interfaces (and that's saying a lot--especially from a former Microsoftie! ) Excel is definitely an easier tool, with a much less savage learning curve. IMO and all that, of course.

[MichaelB]

I am in the middle of the execution phase of an annual charity event that my wife and I have been doing for 14 years. Dinner for about 90, six courses (plus breads), all the prep work is done in our home. The dinner itself is in the restaurant of a downtown hotel. Our dinner is the night before a food grazing event for about 1,000 guests. Food for the big event is by 20 or so chefs from around the country (and Europe). Our dinner guests are the chefs, an assistant for each, the event sponsors and executives from the charity. The main event is a week from Saturday and our dinner is a week from Friday.

For the next 10 days, my constant companion will be a 15 page (more or less) Word document consisting of the menu, place settings, plate presentations and service requirements, a task list by day, ingredient lists, quantities and techniques by course, and ingredients and quantities by vendor for ordering purposes. I have been using a document like this for at least 9 years (that's how many versions I have archived).

Last week's companion was a spreadsheet of the last 9 menus by course that I carried around as I ruminated over this year's menu. Next week's menu finally made it to paper at 10:00 this morning.

This is a long way of saying that the basic organization for any project hasn't changed in many years -- or centuries; the tools just evolve.

[Kayakado]

I love anything that can be computerized. I am in the throes right now of planning 6 roadside rest stops for an organized bike ride. We'll have about 600 riders, who ride varying distances (18, 30, 60, 80 and 100 miles) so each rest stop sees varying numbers of riders from 100 to 600. I've inventoried all the equipment for each location. I've got 6 bins of stuff like knives, untensils, cutting boards, TP, PT, soap, sanitzers, etc. What a PIA. I had to wash them all and the bins from a ride 6 months ago. Once we get a count of riders and their planned distances the food will be purchased and the food and serving implements like trays and bowls needed to serve that food and drink will be divided up according to how many riders each rest stop will service. It is a logistical challenge that would be awful without spreadsheets - lots of them!!!

[markabauman]

I actually made a spreadsheet last night for a different purpose. I must have 12 or 15 different recipes for a basic pizza dough- I just transferred the ingredient list (flour, water, olive, salt, sugar, etc.) with each source so I can view them all at once for comparison testing of the different recipes in order to come up one (or a synthesis) of what I might like to use.

[Cleo]

When I have company for meals at my place, I make a spreadsheet. Not color coded (maybe next time!), but I like to have things down on paper. It helps keep my mind at ease.

I list things like wht serving dishes/utensils I will be using, who will be bringing what (particularly for my seder), where and when things need to be cooked and/or heated up since I have limited oven space.

I admit it, I love my lists.

[Suzanne Podhaizer]

My friends laugh at me because I'm a complete spreadsheet geek! Here are some of the culinary uses I've found for Excel:

1) Indexing my food magazines. I track article topics, all recipes by main ingredients, recommended restaurants and wines, etc. This takes forever!!

2) Creating a recipe database. When I take cookbooks out of the library or borrow them, I enter all of my favorite recipes. Each tab is for a different type of recipe. I have a separate sheet for my own recipes.

3) Keeping track of food costs. Self-explanatory!

4) Planning weekly menus. I get almost all of my food from farm shares, and each week I need to make sure that I use up all of the vegetables (in order from most perishable to least perishable), so this is how I do it.

It's a wonder I have time for anything else!

[Eden]

Oh I also use Excel for my list of dinner parties we've given with the main dishes & guests listed. (I try to avoid duplication this way...)

[Idlewild]

We made a Gantt chart for thanksgiving cooking last year - it was our first attempt at cooking the whole spread. I'm not American and my husband is not actually well versed in the preparation of all the traditional dishes so it came in really handy for us to be able to see at what point we should be doing which task.