Lately Maya and I have been preparing dinner from recipes 3-5 times a week, mostly recipes we have never used before. As a result, I've come to the conclusion that there might be some room for improvement in the presentation of recipes. The typical presentation, with the list of ingredients (sometimes indicating the initial processing, like chopping, necessary for each one) followed by the steps of preparation, is certainly functional and natural. But when I'm in the thick of cooking, I often find myself searching desperately through the recipe's prose for a piece of information that I've already read at least 5 times, and taking too long to find it. I also tend to get slowed down when assembling several ingredients to be mixed together. I read one off the list, fetch it, measure it out, find the next one, repeat, with each 'read' taking, in my opinion, a lot longer than it should. So I've been thinking about other ways of presenting the information that might either replace or augment the standard one.

The most radical innovation I've seen (my experience is still quite limited, and I'd be glad to hear about others) is by Michael Chu over at Cooking for Engineers. In addition to prose, he presents at the end of his recipes a table (patent pending, he claims at the bottom of every page on the site) with a row for each ingredient, and a column for each processing step, with the rows merging every time ingredients are combined. They come out very nicely in HTML. A simple example can be seen by scrolling down in his recipe for Asparagus with Almonds. I haven't actually cooked from any of his recipes yet, but it seems like the table would be a much easier way to get a glance at the ingredients I need to combine in a given step. I might still need to refer back to the prose for details about a step, such as that "[when done] the asparagus should be crisp but without a raw taste," but some of those could always be added to the table if one were willing to sacrifice neatness and compactness. I also want to mention how great it is that Chu provides copious pictures of how the food ought to look at each step, something sorely lacking in cookbooks and on mainstream recipe sites.

Another idea I've had is to provide some visual sense of how long each step in the recipe takes, so that you can have an accurate idea of how far along you are. Many times, despite trying to read the recipe thoroughly before starting, I have looked down to see what to do next with my nice mixture, and found "chill for one hour", or four hours, or overnight. Argh! A chart showing the steps in rows, with the height of the row being proportional to the time consumed by the step, would clear this up instantly. This could even be combined with Michael Chu's tables. Or it could be expanded upon with multiple tracks for steps that can be done simultaneously, such as chilling one item while cooking another. An example, taken from Cooking For Engineers' Cheesecake Recipe:

The basic idea in this recipe is that you make the crust, pre-bake it, and let it cool, and while you're doing that you make the filling, then bake both, then let the final product cool and refrigerate before serving it. In the table above the word "Bake" in the Crust row has been reduced to a single pixel to make everything the right size. But I think this is a pretty fast and effective way of letting you know that you should not be putting your cake in the oven a half hour before the company is to arrive.

It says something either about the vastness of NYC, or about myself, that even after actively keeping up on the restaurant scene for several months, I still regularly have moments like this: I find out from Eater that a restaurant has closed, and it's the first time I've heard of the restaurant, and it turns out it's a restaurant that I would have loved to eat at. The only consolation in this case is that I probably wouldn't have been able to afford more than a light lunch at said restaurant. The place was called Chikubu, and according to Eater and others, served extremely authentic Japanese fare, including ramen lunch on Fridays and Saturdays that turned the place into a madhouse of transplanted salarimen, and at dinner, "a wide and weird array of incredibly expensive seafood delicacies flown in from Japan." Check out some of their appetizers:

• Fresh sea urchin
• Marinated "Hotaru" squid
• Jellyfish with vinegar sauce
• Salted entrails of the trepang (aka sea cucumber)
• Sweet young bee with honey soy sauce

You can see the rest at Menupages, though it won't do you much good at this point. The rest of the menu is mostly more familiar selections, but it all sounds awesome. The lack of California rolls, or any other fancy-named ones, tells me that this must indeed have been one of the more authentic Japanese restaurants in the city. I'm very sad to see it go, particularly without having tried it. For now I'll have to set my sights on Rosanjin instead.

Today I went to Qdoba, the mexican fast food place that just opened a location on 53rd and 3rd. It's remarkable how many details there are the same as at Chipotle, which has a location one and a half blocks away. From the shredded pork available in the burritos, to the salsa options, the self-service fountain drinks and the selection thereof, the bottles of hot sauce and lime wedges, to the slogans about emphasizing fresh ingredients, it's a bit spooky. I won't pass judgment on who copied whom, because the real story is often more complicated than it seems, but it's certainly a direct challenge.

Some things are done differently. The Chipotle location nearby is a dank, industrial box. Frigid air gusts in every time the door is opened. The line snakes around the entire place at peak times, so that everyone eating there has hungry people standing over them. The very high ceilings somehow make it all the more forbidding. It's about the worst place imaginable to eat the food you buy there.

Qdoba is a big improvement in both atmosphere and crowd control. They have two separate burrito assembly lines, and the queues are kept folded up and away from the plentiful seating. A vestibule keeps the cold air out. When I walked in an employee said "welcome to Qdoba," both greeting me and informing me of the correct pronunciation--cue doh ba.

As for the food, some have said it's not as good as Chipotle. Personally I guess I'm something of a burrito utilitarian; I couldn't detect any big difference.

I'm not sure how all this looks for the Burritoville that is almost directly across 52nd Street from Chipotle, completing the trifecta. Its food is somewhat inferior, but it still draws a lunchtime crowd, and I've had a soft spot for the chain ever since high school, when the student special (two dollars for a small burrito and a drink) and free tortilla chips nourished us.

As for me, I'm happy with this turn of events. Clearly the neighborhood's burrito demand was not being met by two merchants. Perhaps the new competition will force Chipotle to become a bit more civilized.

The recent Times article about cooking with ingredients from 99-cent stores, and kottke's comments and assorted links, reminds me of my own experiences with 99 cent stores in my neighborhood. I thought I had written about this, but it turns out I never did, except for a brief mention.

For me it's not so much about trying to make the food seem fancy, though at one point I did sometimes buy food at the 99-cent store. (Their imitation Strawberry Newtons are not too good.) The store I frequent, "99 Cent World," is simply huge, probably a lot like the Jack's mentioned in the article, and has an amazing selection of housewares, hardware, kitchen supplies, and so on. The only catch is that anything you buy there is pretty likely to fail in some way. But because you only paid 99 cents for it, there's not much harm done other than the physical waste, and it actually becomes fun to try to guess what's going to happen. A few reviews of past purchases:

• A plastic plate and soup bowl. For at least a year, the only vessels I ate from at home. I'm still using the plate, but the bowl eventually developed some cracks.
• Sponges. The spongy part separated from the more abrasive scrubbing layer after not very long.
• A level, allen wrenches, sandpaper, screwdrivers, and many other hardware items, most of which worked out just fine, although one jeweler's screwdriver had a tip mysteriously break off.
• A couple of cocktail and martini glasses for my old-timey cocktails project. A connoisseur might sniff at them but I have no complaints.
• A shower curtain set that lasted maybe seven months before a couple of the holes tore through.

Pretty positive overall, though I'm probably forgetting some of the items that didn't work out. PS: the store has the great neon sign "Everything 99 cents and up."

1. When I got an ice cream maker, I was excited to try out some of the recipes in "The Sweet Life" dessert cookbook. For a holiday meal I made two: Apple Cider and Caramel Ice Cream, and Quince Sorbet. The first came off well and offered my first opportunity to make caramel, and as the book said it would, the flavor was quite reminiscent of Tarte Tatin. But I have to admit I was a bit disappointed that the flavor of the two ingredients was so fused, rather than remaining independently recognizable.

The Quince Sorbet turned out very nicely, and was pretty fun to make. The book advised that leaving the seeds in during the preparation, then straining them out at the end, would allow the pectin in them to act as a natural gelatin and make the sorbet creamier. The texture was unique, quite different from that of other sorbet, perhaps halfway between sorbet and Jell-o. The results are below.

2. When I finally got a large Le Creuset Dutch/French oven, I tried out the No-Knead Bread recipe from the New York Times. The recipe's concept is that letting the dough sit at room temperature for an extended period does the same work that kneading would normally do. Supposedly this technique allows home cooks to produce bread of the same calibre as the best bakeries.

The recipe instructs us to "Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature." I let it rest for the full 18, but I found that at that point the dough had actually fallen some from the volume it had at 12 hours. This may have contributed to the compressed appearance the bread had after cooking. It was pretty tasty, but a small reward for the effort because it got stale very very quickly.

3. I spoke recently of my devotion to Pierre Hermé's macarons, or French macaroons. I took the chance to try making my own when the office held a cookie bake-off. I thought I might try to recreate the flavors in the Ispahan, but although I did find Rose water, I couldn't find any lychees in the time I had. So instead I went with chocolate and raspberry, and combined recipes from the web and The Sweet Life. The preparations were a lot of fun and a big mess. Maya offered some much-appreciated assistance in assembling the final product.

To my great surprise, I ended up winning the bake-off. The best part of this was that while everyone was tasting cookies, the bakers were anonymous, so I got to hear everyone's totally honest reactions. Some said that my macaroons tasted like Milanos, others compared them to peanut butter and jelly, and others just made interesting faces. After my trip to Pierre Hermé and the fun I had making them, I think I'll stick to my theme if there's ever another bake-off, and experiment with flavors some more.

4. I've also been pretty excited about Molecular Gastronomy, whatever its limitations, and wanting to see if I can do any of it at home without any anti-griddles or vacuum cookers. I perused the recipe collection at Khymos.org, and one struck me as requiring almost no effort or special ingredients at all. It wasn't really a recipe so much as the idea, from Hervé This, that if you made an emulsion of egg white and olive oil, and heated it in a microwave, it would set as a gel. This might not taste very good on its own, but it was suggested that one could add other flavors easily. There were no measures specified.

When I microwaved the mixture, bubbles expanded outward and upward in an impressive display. I let the microwave go for about ten seconds. When I turned it off, the mixture lost its volume abruptly. I took it out, and it had basically turned into a small puck of cooked egg white. In appearance and smell it was just about the nastiest thing I've ever made; I didn't bother tasting it.

The recipe collection has now been updated and much improved, and this idea has become a real recipe, with fruit syrup in the place of olive oil. It states that one egg white will yield two liters of foam, and that only a couple of seconds in the microwave are necessary.