About

Welcome to this repository of food and stuff.

My name is Alex, and I am not a professional chef. I started cooking when I was around sixteen, mostly for myself and soon after for others around me who hungered. Though I once pondered life in a professional kitchen, I instead focused my studies on mathematics. In 2020 I obtained a PhD in Mathematics, after which I began a career in data science, and am currently employed by Pinterest.

This collection began as a personal Obsidian vault. Frankly, I had grown tired of the state of recipe retrieval on the internet. I should not have to scroll through an entire blog post and a dozen advertisements just to find a roasting temperature, a cooking time, or a water-to-flour ratio.

Although I spend a lot of time in the kitchen, I am merely a hobbyist. I do not remember how much baking powder goes into pancake batter. I had also accumulated years' worth of tweaks to familiar recipes, notes on techniques that worked (and ones that didn't), and a growing collection of recipes of my own. Eventually, it seemed sensible to write all of this down.

I set up my vault to allow me to quickly record my recipes as I made them. Rather than constantly rewriting the same ingredients across multiple recipes, I also began recording ingredients I use, and set up my recipe templates to select them from a dropdown menu. This allowed me to search for recipes by way of ingredients. What began as a collection of recipes became something closer to a small, personal database of food. I found it to be a useful resource and, as a friend of mine reminded me, sharing is caring.

Rather than ask anyone else to reproduce the increasingly intricate and idiosyncratic Obsidian setup, I built this website to serve as a collection of my recipes, my thoughts on food and food preparation, and any related ventures. It is my goal to see others use this as their own repository, upload their own recipes, and share with me their knowledge and techniques.

Please enjoy the collection of recipes herein, presented without excessive fluff and with no advertising (for now).