Weezl and friends Phase 2 -giving it a whirl for Shirl! Testing meal plan for a month

SusanC_2

Lesley_Gaye wrote: »

I need to decide what to do with a huge bowl of red, black and white currants, and gooseberries that my friend from round the corner dropped in last night. I had just picked the raspberries(another 500g), so I gave her those, and a big bag of lettuce and rocket leaves. We have had nearly 2kg of raspberries now. Oh yes, I need to pick those too. Don't want the birds eating them!

Gooseberry cheesecake is a good way of using gooseberries.

Lesley_Gaye wrote: »

We have several teeny, 1 inch, cucumbers that I am watching excitedly. Haven't grown cucumbers before. And the runner beans are flowering away like mad, can't wait for the first picking

I'm jealous - my cucumber looked amazing until I planted it out and now the leaves are all turning yellow.

Lesley_Gaye wrote: »

The score for produce from the garden so far is now £75.72. Priced the gooseberries I picked at £4.40kg as the greengrocer had some at that price

Well done. Ours is about £4 as an estimate as we've just had salad so far.

SusanC_2

weezl74 wrote: »

:DThis is the question, as you all know we are revamping the recipes page as 150 recipes all layed out in one enormous table will cause immediate bounce away from the page. So in line with susan's suggestion, we are building a recipes initial index page which will have a few 'categories' of recipe to narrow your choice:

see Snacks
see Breakfasts
see Lunches
see Dinners
see Vegan meals
see low fat meals
see meals containing butternut squash (actually probably not that one!)
etc

the killer question is when you have picked your choice, when the list is presented does it still need to have the column sort capability as we have now? ie currently you can sort the recipes page in order of cost, ease, freezes well, vegetarian/vegan etc...


we now would have 8 actual pages for every top level selector and if there are say 6 options we now have 48 recipe- pages if you get my drift. I am not saying I can't churn them out, it's whether they are implicit in people's thoughts on how it will behave and we to work out how long each one takes to generate and would influence the timescale

if we got just one item of data wrong like 109 cals rather than say 119 cals, the correction would mean 48 plus pages to be rebuilt and possibly a day's work each time the data needed updating for whatever reason.

as the site gets bigger and we attempt to accomodate more and more needs this additional build will get bigger each time.

So in a nutshell I'm saying, do we need to be able to sort the recipes AGAIN once we've already sorted them?

I'd say no.

Reasons being:
a) Whilst it is a nice feature for users, it's not something I would expect from a recipe site (actually a lot of recipe sites I use are basically blogs with recipes as posts and then the posts tagged with different categories).
b) The information will still be present in the table (just not the sorting function) which is more than most recipe sites. (Or at least more than the ones I've come across.)
c) If you've got them sorted into those categories there is probably less need for the sort function because each table of recipes will have fewer recipes in anyway so people will more easily be able to scan through themselves.
d) The labour involved doesn't seem worthwhile for the size of the benefit.
e) It sounds like the labour involved in adding things afterwards would be a big inhibitor to the potential addition of further recipes or adjustments to current recipes.

weezl74

thanks susan

Skypemeet update:

we are just debating the merits demerits of the type of indexing used in the middle third of this page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/

but it wouldn't just be our faves it'd be all our categories, with a little pic to click on...?

aless02

weezl -

Apart Hotel 73 website says they do baby cots in the room for only £5/night and seems to have availability for Fri/Sat/Sun night at around £120-130/night. But I can't tell for certain because it won't let me to children online so you may have to phone. Just Google the name for details - location isn't perfect but is a good price and you get a kitchenette in the room!

There's a chain called Citadines Apart'Hotel which has 4 locations around London and offers family accomodation - but availability seems spotty so I think you might be best off phoning them. If you can, try for the Trafalgar Sqaure or Holborn/Covent Garden locations for convenience, but in a pinch the other 2 are suitable as well.

Try looking at Novotel hotels - they seem to market themselves as "family friendly" and are generally quite affordable. The one in Waterloo would be very close to the IWM.

Basically, you're going to have to phone around as no one has online search options for trying to have 2 baby cots in 1 room!

SusanC_2

weezl74 wrote: »

Skypemeet update:

we are just debating the merits demerits of the type of indexing used in the middle third of this page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/

but it wouldn't just be our faves it'd be all our categories, with a little pic to click on...?

It looks good - the only downside I can see is that it makes it very important to get the right pictures to represent each category.

Bigjenny

Finally caught up on the thread. You have all been so busy. Can't offer any help at moment as I have a workman in the kitchen tomorrow and then my BIL is coming to stay for a week.

Afternoon meet for me at IWM as my train doesn't get in till nearly noon.

I have two 6" cucumbers which I will pick soon and several tiny ones, plenty of flowers on the runner beans but only a couple of flowers on the tomatoes.

Cazzdevil

weezl74 wrote: »

So in a nutshell I'm saying, do we need to be able to sort the recipes AGAIN once we've already sorted them?

I hope you don't mind an opinion from a newbie to the CFR site.

The ability to 'sort' recipes by various categories is fantastic however I think there are too many options to choose from. I would say cost isn't really the main issue as you're working to a monthly costing anyway so individual cost of recipes isn't going to be a deciding factor when searching for a recipe, if anything I think it would be the main ingredient which would be the deciding factor (in terms of what's next to use up in the cupboard/fridge etc).

Ability to freeze may be a handy one to keep in case a viewer was wanting to do a batch cook.

Diet isn't really a necessary as you mentioned having a separate pointer to vegan meals anyway and I wouldn't have thought ease would be vital either, certainly not worth having a dedicated sort for.

If it were me perusing the website looking for inspiration I'd be more interested in sorting by meal/recipe category and ability to freeze than anything else.

weezl74

Cazzdevil wrote: »

I hope you don't mind an opinion from a newbie to the CFR site.

The ability to 'sort' recipes by various categories is fantastic however I think there are too many options to choose from. I would say cost isn't really the main issue as you're working to a monthly costing anyway so individual cost of recipes isn't going to be a deciding factor when searching for a recipe, if anything I think it would be the main ingredient which would be the deciding factor (in terms of what's next to use up in the cupboard/fridge etc).

Ability to freeze may be a handy one to keep in case a viewer was wanting to do a batch cook.

Diet isn't really a necessary as you mentioned having a separate pointer to vegan meals anyway and I wouldn't have thought ease would be vital either, certainly not worth having a dedicated sort for.

If it were me perusing the website looking for inspiration I'd be more interested in sorting by meal/recipe category and ability to freeze than anything else.

newbie opinions are the best I think cos that's our main new user

Thanks cazz

Slight concern about only dividing into say brekkies/lunches/dinners as that may be 75-100 recipes on a page fairly soon, and we don't want to scare the reader with option overload!

Ermmm, any wise thoughts for us on that one?:A

Cazzdevil

I give up. I really wanted to read through the whole thread and find out what everyone has been up to but it's just TOO daunting, 300 pages is a LOT to read. Really it was just to find out one thing anyway...

Who's Kitty?!

shanks77

Kitty is our vegan version on Shirley. Her site has been put on hold for the time being but you can still try her recipes if you fancy