Eating Albion

My Forkd ‘feta’ invite finally arrived the other day, and I’ve been checking it out. Obviously it’s early days yet, with a fair few features still ‘coming soon’, but that’s OK. I made risotto for tea tonight, with the weekend’s lef-over chicken, and thought ‘I’ll add that as my first recipe’. However, Jared’s already done it. OK, slightly different technique and type of ingredients, but essentially the same dish. It kind of knocks the wind out of your ‘I want to contribute too’ sails.

And, while 1,692,254 people have uploaded a photo-tagged sunset onto Flickr at the time of writing, will that many upload risotto recipes to Forkd? Every photo is unique, although recipes aren’t supposed to be unique - they’re supposed to be an authoritative guide to how to do it, right? Having said that, the BBC has 13 mushroom risotto recipes, all different.

Also, there are 971 groups about food recipes on Flickr already, but what’s interesting about Forkd is the ability to alter recipes, thus creating descendants of that recipe. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out. I guess the Flickr equivalent would be allowing people to recrop and colour-correct your pictures, then add them to their own Flickr stream (which I suppose they could already do under certain Creative Commons licencing, which is what Forkd is using).

Mind you, when I first started using Flickr it was an instant messaging photo-swapping site, and look where that is now. It’s evolved faster than Spock in Star Trek III. I remember Cal coming to do a talk at the BBC years ago, where he said after six months they’d thrown the whole thing away and started again. I hope Forkd’s got a similarly rapid evolution planned, because like the mammal in the world of the large content dinosaurs, it could become something fantastic.

Anyway, with chicken and mushroom risotto (though mine had peas) covered on Forkd, I thought I’d add my linguini with vlams recipe from a while back, and here it is.