The Way I Wish Recipes Were Written

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I’m fine with the listing the ingredients.  I use that list to make sure I have sufficient amounts of all ingredients needed (or suitable substitutes, like one cup butter in place of a tablespoon butter).

My problem is with the directions.  When reading the directions, I always have to look back up at the ingredient list to search through it to find whatever ingredient they are referencing just to find out the amount of that ingredient.  How hard would it be to put the amount needed of an ingredient right in the directions too?  A sample:

Toast
Ingredients:
– 2 slices bread
– 2 tsp. butter
– 2 tbsp. strawberry rhubarb jam

Directions:
1. Toast bread (2 slices).
2. Remove bread from toaster, spread butter (2 tsp.) and jam (2 tbsp.) on each slice of bread equally.

Eh?  Eh?  So much easier!  No rereading the ingredient list to find out how much butter or jam!  It’s all right there!  No going back and forth from directions to ingredients! Someone please write some computer code to automatically change online recipes to display this way.

Books I’m Reading – Restaurant and Nonprofit Edition

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The first book I’m reading is Setting the Table. Danny Meyer writes like he runs his restaurants, focusing on warmth to the customer.  And the guy knows how to run restaurants, as he has opened several in New York and closed none.  It’s part autobiography, and part his management philosophy (which is very Zingerman’s – who, by the way, now does food tours around the world).  A good quote, relevant to the Detroit Institute of Bagel’s philosophy on starting a business in Detroit:

You may think, as I once did, that I’m primarily in the business of serving good food.  Actually, though, food is secondary to something that matters even more.  In the end, what’s most meaningful is creating positive, uplifting outcomes for human experiences and human relationships.  Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel.  It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.

The second book I’m reading is Forces for Good. The authors studied high-impact nonprofits and came up with six common practices.  These organizations include America’s Second Harvest, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, City Year, Environmental Defense, the Exploratorium, Habitat for Humanity, The Heritage Foundation, National Council of La Raza, Self-Help, Share Our Strength, Teach For America, and Youthbuild USA.

Unless you are ready to implement these practices, skimming through will do, as it is a research book with lots of examples that all support the same conclusions.  The six practices:

  1. Advocate and serve – as in be involved in changing policy and be on the ground, in communities serving those you are trying to help.
  2. Make markets work – use what are regularly for-profit business practices, or partner with for-profit businesses.
  3. Inspire evangelists – people who will spread your message for you.
  4. Nurture nonprofit networks – as in don’t compete with other nonprofits like there is only so much pie, but increase the size of the pie.
  5. Master the art of adaptation – be flexible to change programs to fit new conditions, either cutting or adding programs.
  6. Share leadership – good nonprofit executives share their power, stick around awhile, and have good relationships with a large board.

Last Week in the Top Billion

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For my final book before Mali, I read Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion.  In it, Collier talks about the poorest billion (surprise!), and how they differ from the more prosperous poor.  Like Jeffrey Sachs‘ idea of a poverty trap, Collier writes about four traps that are keeping the bottom billion down:

  1. The conflict trap:  “the risk that a country in the bottom billion falls into civil war in any five-year period is nearly one in six.” And, “the typical postconflict country has little better than a fifty-fifty chance of making it through the first decade in peace”.  Not great odds.
  2. The natural resource trap:  the exporting of a valuable natural resource causes “Dutch disease”, increasing the value of the country’s currency, reducing the competitiveness of the country’s other exports, and leaving the natural resource the only industry.  Also developing countries have a tough time coming up with ideal ways of handling the windfall of capital.
  3. Being landlocked with bad neighbors:  the neighbors of a landlocked country are important as a transportation route to the sea and as markets themselves.  For non-African landlocked countries, for every one percent growth in a neighbor, the country grew 0.7 percent — in Africa the country only grew 0.2 percent.
  4. Having bad governance in a small country:  “starting from a failing state, a country was more likely to achieve a sustained turnaround the larger its population, the greater the proportion of its population that had secondary education, and…if it had recently emerged from civil war”.  He highlights the fact that “democracy doesn’t seem to help policy turnaround”.

And unlike other books that just describe the problems, he has researched solutions:  aid, military intervention, laws and charters, and trade policy.  But I’ll let you read about those.  I have more developed country luxuries to enjoy before I leave, like Giada.