My cooking recipe collection has been with the Paprika Recipe Manager for quite some time. I’m a card-carrying member of the digital hoarder club, so the recipe collection has grown tremendously. The honest truth though is that I only cook a tiny subset of this collection on a regular basis and only seldom venture beyond that comfort zone. I’m definitely not a good cook.

The Paprika Recipe Manager app is really nice. I have it on all my devices, it syncs well, it has a nice presentation of the recipes. The browser feature is its secret killer feature: you find a recipe on the web, let the built-in Paprika browser load the page and extract the recipe from the page contents. It correctly populates the ingredients list, the step-by-step guide, the icon and title, etc.

But now that we have LLMs there is this desire to free the recipes from their “proprietary” storage (*, more on the format later), store them as plain text and expose them to our LLM of choice. In theory this would allow us to interact with a recipe using plain language and the LLM will transform and present it as we wish. For example: change the units, replace a particular ingredient for another, find alternatives satisfying certain dietary restrictions, doing the scaling up or down according to the number of people we want to serve. I’m saying in theory. We will see how well this works in practice.

The first step though is to extract the recipes from Paprika Recipe Manager and convert them to some form of plain text recipes.

.paprikarecipes

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The proprietary storage mentioned in the Intro comes with an asterisk, and this is a big kudos to the Paprika Recipe Manager people and lucky for us: the format is not really that proprietary, at least when you export the recipes as .paprikarecipes files. It turns out, these .paprikarecipes files are just zip files. Inside them each recipe again is a zip file of JSON data and some image data, either embedded as base64 data or as a separate zip file. So all in all very amenable to processing by a script.

This covers the source, but what about the destination.

Cooklang

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For the destination format of our conversion I made a geeky choice: cooklang. It’s a pretty straightforward plain text markup format. I think an example will suffice to convey the idea:

---
title: "Peach Strudel"
---

@sliced fresh peaches{1 1/2%cup}
@cinnamon{1/2%tsp}
@sugar{1%tbsp}
@flour{1%tbsp}
@1/4 chopped walnuts{}
@brown sugar{2%tbsp}
@bread crumbs{1%tbsp}
@white sugar{1%tbsp}
@1 puff pastry{}
@1 egg{}

Peach Strudel Ingredients

I'm going to use:

   * 1 1/2 cup sliced fresh peaches
   * 1/2 tsp cinnamon
   * 1 tbsp sugar
   * 1 tbsp flour

We're going to mix that up. Again, you can do this with apples, pears, etc. It also usually contains some dried fruit. So I'm going to add a 1/4 cup of raisins.

Strudel Filling Ingredients

The filling of a strudel has two parts; this is the fruit part, and the other part is this sugar mixture. So combine:

   * 1/4 chopped walnuts
   * 2 tbsp brown sugar
   * 1 tbsp bread crumbs
   * 1 tbsp white sugar

Give that a mix.

Prepare the Premade Strudel Pastry

And there is the pastry - and why this is so easy - we're going to use a sheet of frozen supermarket puff pastry. Put it on a well floured board, with a little more flour over the top. With your rolling pin, we're going to make a rectangle shape. Notice the seams are going in the same direction as we are rolling. We're going to get this about 1/8 inch thick - and a little longer than it is wide. 

Don't worry if the ends fray a little bit, as long as the sides are straight. When we roll it you won't see any of that. It will also have a nice side (smoother) and a not so nice side. We're going to do an egg wash, which is one egg and a splash of water.

Assemble the Strudel

With the less attractive side facing up, and the smoother side facing down - egg wash that really well. Put the sugar mixture down on just 2/3rd of the dough. Put the fruit on the bottom 1/3, and leave about a 2 inch space at the bottom and sides.

Fold the Strudel

The folding is very simple. Start by bringing up the first 2 inches - kind of pinch the bottom a little. Roll it over once, that's the second third - pinch in the sides a bit to keep it all together. And then the last fold, and we're going to have a nice completed strudel package. The fold is always down of course.

Bake the Strudel

We're going to place that on our baking sheet, I'm going to use a silicon mat, but you can use parchment paper - these do tend to leak a bit from the fruit. We're going to cut a slice in the top about every inch to give it that signature strudel look, and to vent the air and steam. Paint it very well with egg wash. We're going to put that in a 375°F oven for about 40-45 minutes, until it's browned, beautiful and looks like this.

Please forgive my obsession with Strudel.

Conversion

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We have the source, the destination and we have Antigravity. The result is cookcc, a pretty straightforward Go script that given a .paprikarecipes file, executes the conversion and saves the .cook files in an output directory.

What can we do with these .cook files ? A future post will experiment with exposing them to Gemini (that’s just the LLM I pay for). But for now we can install cookcli and then view the files in a nice web UI:

brew install cookcli
cd recipe_collection_output_dir
cook server --open

My current victim is my nephew, 9th grade. I try to be more patient, less pushy and mean. Big change: I let the student drive the session. It’s office hour style with questions coming from student homework. We’re doing it over videoconferencing because we don’t live close together. You can read about the setup here.

So far so good, he seems to not hate it yet.

I, on the other hand, kinda like it because I have to find new twists to explain some material and I get the excuse to read up on things I forgot long time ago. I’ll give an example for each.

In math the current topic we’re dealing with is parabola. The exercise in the homework gives you the graph of a parabola with a grid such that you can recognize some nice integer $(x, f(x))$ pairs like in the figure below.

The exercise asks for the function equation given the graph. No problem, right? We just pick three pairs of $(x, f(x))$ from the graph, for example $(0, 4), (1, 1), (2, 0)$ and solve the system of linear equations coming from evaluating $f(x)= a x^2 + b x + c$ at those pairs.

Except they haven’t learned systems of linear equations yet. We need to figure out a different way to come up with the function equation. The exercise had some additional information: the parabola is not compressed or stretched. Meaning, it is identical in its form to $f(x)=x^2$, only shifted, in this case shifted to the right. The shifted function $f_s$ is identical in form to the original function $f(x)=x^2$, only shifted to the right along the $x$ axis. To compute a value $f_s(x)$ we have to find the corresponding $x’$ value according to the parabola form and evaluate $f(x’)$. The easiest identifying point is the vertex of the parabola. How much do you have to shift $x$ corresponding to the vertex of $f_s$ left to get to the vertex of $f$. From the graph it is visible that we have to shift two units left (shifting left means subtracting), so $f_s(x) = f(x-2)$. Of course we can do this algebraically also. We need to shift $x$ back by an unknown amount, say $a$: $f_s(x) = f(x-a)$ and the most convenient $x$ to use to solve for $a$ in this case is the $x$ corresponding to the vertex of $f$: $x = 2$.

$$ \begin{aligned} f_s(2) & = f(2-a) \\ 0 & = (2 - a)^2 \\ 0 & = 2 - a \\ a & = 2 \end{aligned} $$

So the function equation we need is $f_s(x) = (x - 2)^2$. What if the parabola (still not stretched or compressed, so identical to $x^2$) is shifted left by some amount, say $5$ (determined by looking where the vertex ended up? Similar reasoning leads to $f_s(x) = (x + 5)^2$. What if the parabola got shifted up by $3$? So instead of shifting along the $x$ axis it got pushed up along the $y$ axis, as in the figure below.

Well, the shifted value $f_s(x)$ at a given $x$ is pushed up by the constant amount $3$, so $f_s(x) = x^2 + 3$. You can combine the two shifts and get $f_s(x) = (x - 7)^2 + 3$ if it was shifted right by seven units and up by three. Etc, etc. The eye roll from the student or the reader at this point is magnificent 🙂. But solving a system of linear equations was not needed. One last thing before I move on to the second example of why I enjoy this tutoring activity. What if the parabola is compressed or stretched? Well, we can spy what the compressing/stretching factor should be. It is compressing the $x$ axis by pinching points together or stretching the $x$ axis by pulling them apart.

You can read from the graphs by how much you have to scale $x$ before feeding it into the original $x^2$ form. Or you can solve for the scaling factor algebraically. Combining that with the shifts covers all parabolas that have the opening facing up. If a parabola faces down instead, you invert the $y$ axis by computing it facing up and then multiplying the quadratic part by $-1$.

So obviously in general you are still dealing with three unknowns: $f(x) = (\alpha x - h)^2 + v$ where $\alpha$ is the compression factor, $h$ is the horizontal shift and $v$ is the vertical shift. But these are easier to read off the graph than the general form $f(x)= a x^2 + b x + c$. I know, 🙄. Respect, if you’re still here.

Ok, on to the second example, this one from physics. The topic is energy. What is energy? What are the different forms of energy? What are the units and how do they relate to those different energy forms. They are currently learning about kinetic energy, potential energy in a gravitational field of a large object (Earth), calorie burn energy and I think potential energy of a spring (I don’t remember). But how do you explain energy to somebody? It is quite abstract. What do all these energy forms have to do with each other and why is there conservation of energy? Hard questions.

Well, the best physics teacher in the world, Richard Feynman, is here to help: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_04.html

Imagine a child, perhaps “Dennis the Menace,” who has blocks which are absolutely indestructible, and cannot be divided into pieces. Each is the same as the other. Let us suppose that he has 28 blocks. His mother puts him with his 28 blocks into a room at the beginning of the day. At the end of the day, being curious, she counts the blocks very carefully, and discovers a phenomenal law—no matter what he does with the blocks, there are always 28 remaining! This continues for a number of days, until one day there are only 27 blocks, but a little investigating shows that there is one under the rug—she must look everywhere to be sure that the number of blocks has not changed. One day, however, the number appears to change—there are only 26 blocks. Careful investigation indicates that the window was open, and upon looking outside, the other two blocks are found…

Read the whole thing, it is great. Anyways, without tutoring I wouldn’t have sought this gem and read it.

I recently needed a distraction for a ten-hour flight. I cannot sleep on flights and I’m also too uncomfortable to do any real work or read. So it has to be binging a show. I chose Deadloch, a murder mystery show with eight one hour episodes, making it the ideal length for a ten hour flight assuming it is compelling enough to stick around.

Deadloch is set in the (fictional) town by the same name, in Tasmania, Australia. The discovery of a body on the beach by two teenagers kicks things off. The victim is the local football coach. It is the first of a string of murders and the victims are all men. The local police detective, Dulcie Collins gets paired up with an outside investigator, Eddie Redcliffe. The two investigators couldn’t be more different. Dulcie is grounded, level-headed, by the book cop. Eddie is rude, brash, quick to accuse without much evidence. Rounding out the investigation team is the eager and intelligent young policewoman Abbie and Sven, a reluctant policeman who likes to delegate but keeps realizing that nobody reports to him so he has to do the things detective Collins asks him to.

Just as colorful as the investigation team are the people being investigated, various residents in Deadloch, all with old conflicts, grudges and connections to the murder victims. All this is happening during Feastival, a festival organized by the new mayor of Deadloch. This provides plenty of material to fill the eight episodes and the Feastival is a continuous source of much of the comedy with the mayor’s desperate efforts to keep it going while all the murders happen.

Needless to say, I stuck around and finished it on the flight. You can catch it on Amazon Prime (I used the Prime app to download all the episodes onto my laptop before the flight. It worked great).

I cannot really explain why I like the John Le Carre type of content so much. If I let myself indulge in armchair psychology, maybe what appeals to me is the heightened awareness of the facade of ourselves that spies must have. These fictional I have no idea how real spies function or if there is any resemblance between fictional and real. spies are forced to distrust every aspect of their interactions and relationships, have to build intricate webs of lies and dole out information and withhold information at crucial times. There’s always this cat and mouse game, who is hunting whom. Moles have to be discovered and turned. This all makes for great fiction. There’s also the witty dialog, the posh manners, the higher moral calling, the self doubt. John Le Carre was a master chef of all this spy brew, mixing it all together into an elegant story. I consumed all of it and haven’t found a worthy successor of him yet. Well, I’m here to say, if we’re allowed to change the medium from novel to TV series, “A spy among friends” comes really close. Combine the terrific writing with fantastic performances, a strong female lead, patience to let the story unfold in six one-hour episodes and trust in the viewer to follow along and you have a very satisfying spy show. I have only one, slight complaint: does everybody in the show really have to smoke so much ?

The English

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I’m very reluctantly linking to the trailer because it is misleading and pretty bad. It gives you the wrong idea of what this show is about. Yes, there is the bang bang western action and it is well done, expertly choreographed. But that’s just the beginning and there’s so much more and it is so much better. The human connection that Lady Cornelia and Eli form while navigating this dog eats dog world feels so real, their chemistry is so authentic. All the supporting roles are well cast and their characters have their own journeys that are well motivated. The landscape photography in the show could have been straight out of a Terrence Malick movie. And the whole story really opens your eyes to the human tragedy that was the colonization of the Americas by Europeans. We’re in denial about the cruelty with which the Native American population was eliminated, subdued and disposessed and this show opens the curtain, at least a little bit. The uncurable disease some of the characters suffer from can be a metaphor of the unerasable shame of the colonizers for their actions (which makes the final scene back in England with White Moon such a touching act of forgiveness).

I’m instead using puff pastry from Whole Foods:

The ingredients for the recipe are:

• 1 1/2 cup sliced apples
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 tbsp flour
• 1/4 chopped walnuts
• 2 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 tbsp bread crumbs
• 1 tbsp white sugar
• 1 puff pastry
• 1 egg

First, peel the apples and slice them up into small pieces. In a bowl, mix them with 1/2 tsp cinnamom, 1 tbsp sugar and 1 tbsp flour. In a second bowl mix 1/4 chopped walnuts, 2 tbsp brown sugar, 1 tbsp bread crumbs and 1 tbsp white sugar.

Let the puff pastry defrost properly. On a flat, well floured board spread the pastry with a rolling pin until it is fairly thin (watch the video above on how thin it can get). Paint a little egg wash on the spread-out pastry and layer the breadcrumb mix from the second bowl onto 2/3 of the surface. Put the apple mix from the first bowl on top onto 1/3 of the surface.

Fold (roll) the whole thing gently, keeping everything together. It should look like a nice rolled package.

Here my daughter is doing the egg wash painting the rolls (she loves that).

Put it on a baking sheet and paint the whole roll with egg wash. Cut little straight sliced holes, evenly spaced into the dough to give the pressure escape hatches.

Bake it in the middle rack at around 375F for about 42-45 min.

You can do with other fruit too, peaches and cherries are great.

Like many others I picked up bread making during the pandemic lockdown. It turned out to be a fun activity. I eventually landed on Richard Bertinet’s youtube video explaining dough handling.

With a little practice I got it going the way he suggests and I use his method ever since.

I don’t have a bread baking stone and my oven doesn’t have steam injection, so I use a cast iron Dutch oven that I seriously preheat and then spray a little to generate steam.

Bertinet’s book is full of great bread making recipes without overwhelming you with difficult processes. It has clear explanations next to relevant pictures teaching you exactly what to do in simple, clearly laid out steps. You probably won’t succeed with everything on the first try, but it’s fun attempting. His youtube channel is a useful supplemental teaching source.