"wiki" news and stories

Wikis, if you're not familiar with them, are online pages that anyone can edit. This leads to comprehensive definitions on just about any subject from applications like the Wikipedia. For a recipe, this means that all the collective knowledge of cooks can be added in to one central location. Does it make the perfect recipe? The directions for making a grilled cheese sandwich at WikiHow look pretty clear and even though the instructions are simple, keep in mind that every great chef (and hungry cook) must start somewhere. If the stove top method is too conventional, you can also try using a George Foreman grill or an iron.

Speaking of grilled cheese, here are a few facts to tide you over while you wait for your sandwich to be done:

• Americans make 2.2 billion grilled cheese sandwiches at home each year.
• The most popular two cheeses for grilled cheese are cheddar and American, though Gouda, Swiss and Gruyere are also quite popular, especially in Europe.
• 30% of Americans name the grilled cheese as their favorite homemade sandwich
• Grilled cheese often has add-ins and the most common is tomato, followed by bacon/ham, potato chips and pickles, while other variations include the French croque-monsieur and croque-madame.

Source

The internet is chock full of recipe sites ranging from the good to the bad. Usually, when I'm researching a recipe, I use a combination of Google and my favorite recipe aggregation sites. The CookbookWiki aims to collect all the world's culinary traditions and recipes into one wiki site. Wikipedia already does a good job of covering food, but perhaps with CookbookWiki's tight focus, it can be an even more invaluable resource for chefs and amateur cooks alike. They already have an aggressive development plan for the content. What do you think about this resource?

Source

Eric (who's great, we hear) was wondering whether it's "doughnuts" or "donuts." So I'll do my best to answer.

Doughnuts is clearly the original spelling. According to the wiki on the subject, it's the only spelling listed in Thorndike and Lorge's The Teacher's Word Book of 30,000 Words.

I have no idea why that book is an authority. Usually, the Oxford English Dictionary is considered the be-all and end-all for words. But the British, well, they don't know from doughnuts, according to the Word Detective. He says it's a purely American treat, and the word's earliest known use was in Washington Irving's 1809 account of life in New York, when he described "balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog fat." There were no holes in the original version.

In my opinion, "Donut" is no better than "Minit" or "Kwik" or "Kopy" - a dumb misspelling created for cute-itude. It seems to date from the 1950s, when Dunkin' Donuts first hit the scene. So, then, "doughnut" is correct, unless you're referring to the products of the double D.