Cheffy Blog

I’m pleased to announce that we have release the new version of Cheffy, what we’ve been calling internally, Cheffy 2.0.

The new version comes with a number of new features, some of which I’ll be detaileding over the coming weeks, but as a headline:

• New layout and structure
• New Inspire Me section for quick access to selected recipes
• Your own personal Kitchen area where you can manage your preferences, your cookbooks, recipes, shopping list, and connect with other users.
• Add your own recipes - you can now add a recipe, have the nutrition automatically calculated, and then share that recipe with others.
• RSS feeds for your cookbook, recipes, and Inspire me and automated searches
• Improved searching and nutrition information

And there’s more to come - please start using the site and let us know what you think, or if you find any problems.

Some very exciting news!
After many months of development, we are testing some groundbreaking new functionality:
The ability for you to add your own recipes to Cheffy.

This offers a whole load of benefits. You will be able to:
➢ Keep all your favourite recipes in one online cookbook.
➢ Search them by ingredient, title, diet and by all the Advanced Search features in Cheffy.
➢ Scale them to the number of servings, convert measurements and oven temperature.
➢ Get detailed dietary and nutrition information on your recipes.

More new services we’re testing enabling you to:
➢ Add comments to any recipe in Cheffy – for your own private viewing or public viewing. So these can be notes to yourself – or suggestions and comments to help the Cheffy community.
➢ Rate recipes on how successful you think they are.
➢ Get an average rating on the recipes you’ve submitted.
➢ Find out how many cooks have a recipe in their cookbook – particularly satisfying if that recipe is your own!
And there’s lots more great functionality in the pipeline…

We will have this service running on a beta site very soon. We’d like as many of you as possible to try out the functionality, let us know what you think and report any bugs or issues. Once we’re happy that you’re having a good user experience, we’ll add the functionality to our public Cheffy site. We’ll be contacting all of you that have registered with Cheffy to see if you’d like to be beta testers. We hope you’ll be happy to give us a little of your time to help us shape what we hope will be a truly satisfying and useful service!

The University of London has concluded that eating more than 5 portions of fruit and veg a day can cut the risk of a stroke. Stroke is the 3rd leading cause of death and the leading cause of disability in most developed countries.

Researchers studied 8 reports from Europe, US and Japan involving more than 250,000 people. They found that the risk of stroke was reduced by 26% when eating more than 5 portions of fruit and veg a day - that represents nearly 40,000 strokes a year. The lead researcher, Dr Fent He, commented that eating lots of fruit and vegetables was likely to further reduce the risk of other forms of cardiovascular disease and some cancers.

Fruit and vegetables contain very little fat and provide many nutrients such as Vit C, beta carotene and potassium as well as dietary fibre and beneficial antioxidants. The researchers, however, suspect that it is the potassium which is the most important factor in preventing strokes - as it it recognised that taking additional potassium lowers blood pressure.

We’re often told that what we eat affects our physical health. And it’s long been known that an unhealthy diet can contribute to conditions such as heart disease, strokes, diabetes, various cancers and digestive disorders.
But a report published yesterday sets out the extent of evidence linking what we eat with our mental health and well being – throughout our lives: from foetal development, adolescent behaviour through to Alzheimer’s Disease.

The Mental health Foundation and Sustain (the alliance for better food and farming) has analysed 500 research studies to better understand the link between what we eat and our mental health.

The report claims that a diet should contain a combination of polyunsaturated fats, minerals and vitamins, limiting the amount of saturated fats and sugar to minimise the risk of Attention-deficity/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a range of depressive conditions, Schizophrenia and Dementia.

It’s claimed that a healthy well balanced diet can: relieve the symptoms of some mental illnesses; improve effectiveness of medication for some conditions; and reduce unpleasant side-effects of some medications.

The report, Changing Diets, Changing Minds: how food affects mental health and behaviour, published on 16 January 2006, can be downloaded from www.sustainweb.org/mhealth_index.asp.

We’ve just fixed some bugs you’ve been finding on the site. This should make Cheffy more satisfying to use - and faster too.

If you come across anything on the site which doesn’t work or you get any odd results, just click on ‘Report a Bug’ at the bottom of the page to let us know and we’ll get right onto it.

Overnight we’ve made a small adjustment to the homepage and the main form for searching so that you can see what else is possible. We have three different search methods:

Ingredient Search

This option is available on the homepage (and when browsing your cookbook) and enables you to search for up to three individual ingredients (say, bacon, lettuce, tomato) and either search for recipes containing any combination, or by clicking ‘Must include ingredients’ only recipes containing all three.

The ingredient search was one of our key aims, designed to help you answer the question ‘what can I cook tonight?’ by eimply typing in a list of potential ingredients that you might have in your fridge.

Recipe Title Search

The recipe title search is useful when you want to find a specific type of recipe. For example, if you know you want a casserole then typing casserole into the search box will give you a fairly comprehensive list of casserole dishes. You might also want to try searches like Lasagne or Soup. It is also, of course, immensely useful when you are looking for recipe and words from the title is all you can remember.

Advanced Search

The advanced search allows you to combine any combination of:

• Ingredients
• Recipe title
• Keywords, including cuisine (e.g. Indian, Chinese), base ingredient (e.g. Chicken, Pulses), Dietary/allergy restrictions (e.g. Nut-free, Gluten free, Yeast Free) and the meal type (e.g. Bread, Lunch/Snacks)
• Nutrition - you can (currently) restrict to a number of calories, and rich sources of different vitamins.
• Cooking time - pushed for time? Use advanced search and specify ingredients and your maximum cooking time (which includes preparation and cooking time).

–

Remember that any time after you’ve conducted a search and are viewing the results you can click on ‘Refine my search’ and add further options to your search to get a more specific result.

Hopefully we’ve covered all the bases, but if there is anything else you would like to see in the search system, please let us know!

Cheffy beta is now available at www.cheffy.com. After 5 years of development, it’s now ready for you to play with. And there’s a lot to play with. We now want to tell the world - so please tell your friends, family and colleagues about the site. If you can email anyone you know and put notices up on staff notice boards… We want as many people as possible using the site and giving us feedback. We look forward to hearing from you!

Dateline: Sunday, 19th December, 2005

Cheffy.com goes live!!!

I’m sure Suna will be along any minute now to do a more formal announcement, but I think I can safely say that we are both over the moon to have gone live.

We think this is a pretty cool feature - to be able to set your defaults to the number of servings, oven type, metric or Imperial measurements and sorting preference for recipe results. But what do you think? Is it useful to you?

This feature allows you to save the recipe ingredients into a shopping list - scaling them to the correct number of servings. How useful do you find this feature? Is it helpful to view by recipe and by shopping department? We have more ideas for this feature - but please let us know your views.