Journalist and home chef Natasha Frost has created an ingenious tool to track her culinary creations.
With nearly 170 entries on the spreadsheet, she lists the possible cooking conundrums, including dietary requirements and how much time it takes, to make life easier.
Photo: 123rf
Frost tells Jesse Mulligan that she cooks about 10 meals a week but doesn’t like making the same dish twice a month.
“I realised I was cooking things I really liked and then I wasn’t writing them down or recording them in any way so I started recording them and then over time the spreadsheet grew from there.”
And she only adds the ones she really likes.
“I think I’m ideally situated because I don’t have any children to refuse to eat things, so that gives you a lot of room and also because I work from home.
“I’m sure a lot of people are experiencing in lockdown that if you want to have pasta for lunch, you just can.”
She’s made the list available for public viewing and labelled them according to different dietary requirements, how long it takes as well as the recipe source.
“I have a lot of friends who are vegan or gluten free, so it’s really nice to be able to sort through that.
“So that if I have, for example, a friend coming around for lunch who is both vegan and gluten-free, I can immediately see what stuff I’ve made before is good so that I’m not scrambling.”
She says it’s been encouraging to see other people viewing the list as well.
“Because I cook so often a lot of my friends occasionally get in touch with me and say ‘oh I’m sort of in a rut, have you made anything new that you like?’ and so many of friends found it useful that I put it on Twitter.
“The nice thing is that I quite often see when I click on the spreadsheet at a given time, I can see two or three people looking at, and it gives me a lot of pleasure to think that this little resource I’ve created might be helping other people as well.”
She plans to continue adding to the list for the foreseeable future.
“I don’t know if spreadsheets are particularly a joyful thing but for me, there’s a lot of joy in this particular resource.”
