Wendy asked:
> I think you should have a place where we can comment on your future menus. Unless, of course, you don’t want people commenting on your menus. But I often have comments I could make.
> Why spaghetti and meatballs? What kind of meatballs? What kind of sauce?
As you may remember, about a year ago, I posted about my idea for Meal Bandit. It would have been a web site where anyone could post their upcoming meals for all to see, and people could comment on each other’s meals, and in general it would be a happy nest of home cookery punctuated by occasional flamewars.
I recruited a small team of programmers and artists to help me put it together, by which I mean the team consisted of one programmer, one artist, and me. This was a great arrangement except for two things: I have no artistic skills, and my programming skills haven’t developed since 1999. (Anyone need a Perl CGI script?) Also, I have no management skills. I guess I figured that since I was pretty good at making dinner, making a dinner-related web site would be easy.
Anyway, everything fell apart as quickly as you might imagine, so a year later, I’m still posting my upcoming dinners in the sidebar via [30 Boxes](http://www.30boxes.com/). It’s extremely simple, and I encourage you to do the same, because I have a voyeuristic interest in your dinners and if you don’t post them on your blog, you may see my face outside your window around 6:30pm.
So there won’t be any Meal Bandit, although if anyone would like to take over the idea and build it, you can have it for nothing.
Now, to Wendy’s three questions and one comment.
**Why spaghetti and meatballs?**
We read three books in one day that involved spaghetti and meatballs: some Cookie Monster board book, This Is My Hair, and Eat!. So Iris asked me to make some, and why not?
**What kind of meatballs?**
Beef, pork, veal, breadcrumbs, milk, egg, garlic, onion, Parmigiano, salt, pepper.
**What kind of sauce?**
Chunky tomato sauce. Iris loves big tomato chunks in her sauce, so next time I will make it even chunkier.
**I think you should have a place where we can comment on your future menus.**
The best possibility I can think of is to have a separate page that would show the same list that’s in the sidebar, and you could leave comments on that page. You’d need to include in your comment the name of the dish you’re commenting on, because it would quickly rotate off the list. Would that work?
Hmmm. How about if the box itself was a link to another page where we can comment/question etc.
I’m with Wendy. I think her idea is good. After all, if I hadn’t been paying attention to the box, I would never have heard of Ants on a Tree, much less scoured your archives looking for the recipe and made it for my son.
In any case, just keep doing what you’re doing. I look forward to my RSS feeder showing updates to this blog. It’s one of my faves!
Yes, that would work. I promise not to respond with “Yuck!”. Mam stopped responding to the “What’s for dinner?” question sometime during my childhood because she got tired of hearing “Yuck!” and its variations. Well, often she would answer “Food.” And sometimes “Doof”, because Mam likes to say things backwards. (She also serves “klim” and “dalas”.)
Okay, Wendy, give this a try. It’s not linked from the front page yet because it’s experimental:
Dinners
Matthew,
Love the MealBandit idea. When I first read it, I was thinking a wikispace might work for you, but then I read more about and realized that wouldn’t give you all the cool interfaces and search capabilities that would really make it a great site.
So, yeah, it’d be great if someone would actually create such a thing. However, my programming skills are FORTRAN and MATLAB. Anyone need a building’s loads analyzed?
Okay, the fact that so many of you speak dead programming languages is starting to freak me out.