The Friday Fillip

1 2.5 lb head of cabbage
1 carrot
1 small onion
————
Dressing:
10 tbs sugar or equivalent sweetner
2 tbs white vinegar
4 heaping tbs ff sour cream
6 heaping tbs ff mayo

Shred cabbage, carrot & onion. Mix all ingredients of dressing
throughly. Mix cabbage mixture and dressing well. Chill overnight
& enjoy the next day.

Yep, it’s a recipe for slaw. Mind you, it’s one that would put you so far over your daily caloric allowance that I wonder why they bothered with cabbage in the first place.

What’s interesting, though, in addition to the “ff” this and “ff” that, is that I came by this recipe using Tara (ResearchBuzz) Calishain’s reborn Cookin’ With Google. You put a couple of ingredients into the search box, tell it what sort of recipe you’re after — at the moment the categories are General, Vegan/Vegetarian, WorldWide Cuisine, Atkins Diet, Diabetic, Seafood, and Crockpot — and Tara’s set-up does the rest, kicking out enough recipes from Google to use up everything that’s been languishing in the lower shelves of your fridge.

Here’s the search that got sent to Google when I put in “cabbage” and “carrot” and asked for a vegan/vegetarian recipe:
cabbage carrot (site:fatfree.com | inurl:veganmania | inurl:vegetarianrecipe | inurl:veggiefiles )
Notice that Tara uses site: to send requests for this type of recipe to fatfree.com (“The Low Fat Vegetarian Recipe Archive”) and as well, with the inurl: modifier, to sites the URLs of which contain one of the terms “veganmania,” “vegetarianrecipe,” or “veggiefiles.” The |, or pipe as it’s called, is a substitute for OR; and the parentheses gather together the acceptable alternative terms and conditions.

In her Google Hacks, Tara points out that inurl: is useful for searching only subdirectories bearing the name that follows the colon. Thus if I modified my search to cabbage carrot inurl:veganmania I’d come up with one hit, as it happens, at www.veganmania.com/pages/vegan_wraps.htm for a recipe that contains my two key ingredients.

This also shows how relatively easy it is to construct a search form that’s structured in a useful way. Take a look at her source code. Think about how you might do something similar for your firm. No “ff” though.