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Just watched ifoods.tv pitch on Dragon’s Den and am stunned they didn’t understand the need to rebrand. Makes me want to take Forkd on there

Yet more recipes for things from the garden.  This time some early beetroot, turned in to some rather tasty beetroot and feta soup.

Here it is then. I had to try something with them all

Sautéed Glut of Radishes

So. You got overenthusiastic when you sowed the first radish seed of the spring and now you’ve got a glut. What do you do with them apart from slice them into salads? There are very few recipes for cooking radishes, but Francois pointed me at the Pimp my Radish thread at Ask Metafilter, where I found this one. I particularly like the use of both the radish and the tops. Radish tops taste a whole lot like spinach, by the way. This makes a light summer lunch or an interesting side (use where you usually might use a spinach dish)

Preparation time

5m

Cooking time

15m

Difficulty

1

Serves

2

Ingredients

• 2 bunches radishes (12 large to 20 small per bunch); they have to have their tops still intact
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• Sea salt

Preparation

Top and tail the radishes and cut them into large chunks. Remove the stalks from the radish tops and wash the resulting leaves in a salad spinner (or similar). Peel and finely chop the garlic.

Get the olive oil good and hot in a wide frying pan. Put in the chopped garlic and fry lightly for a moment or two, before throwing in the chopped radishes. Stir fry for a couple of minutes before putting in the leaves.

Keep stirring until the leaves have cooked down and then serve, sprinkled with the sea salt.

We built blogging tools into Forkd pretty much right from the start. Jared, one of the two main brains behind the idea, is a heavy food blogger and he (quite rightly) didn’t want to have to type his recipes in twice. Indeed, the ultimate target was to provide a single central repository for your recipes from which you could publish to multiple places (a la Flickr for photos or Youtube for video).

Sadly very few people so far have used the facility. No great surprise, I guess, in that few of our users as yet are bloggers and that it takes quite an investment and some experimentation to get a nice layout. We’ve done our best to produce microformat-like HTML for the recipe that we post to the blog, but you’ve got to style it regardless.

Still, as one of the people that built it and as both a blogger and keen cook, I thought it about time to actually use the tools myself. I’ve got approximately 20 original recipes on there now; variations on recipes from a wide range of blogs and books. Here is my current favourite:

Chicken Vindaloo

Hot, sharp, genuinely interesting; this isn’t as hot as its British curry house counterpart. Instead this is based on more traditional recipes (primarily this one at Aayi’s recipes). Worth noting that, whatever we may have been led to believe, the aloo in vindaloo doesn’t mean potatoes. Instead it means garlic (explanation at Wikipedia). The use of caramelised onions in the marinade make this a truly unusual but extraordinarily tasty dish.

Preparation time

30m

Cooking time

20m

Difficulty

2

Serves

2

Ingredients

• 2 skinless chicken breasts
• 1 medium onion
• 3 tbsp groundnut oil
• 1″ thumb ginger
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp mustard seeds
• ½ tsp coriander seeds
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp fenugreek seeds (optional)
• ¾ tsp salt
• 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 3 birds eye chillis
• 1 tomato
• 25g fresh coriander (small bunch)
• 125 ml water

Preparation

Chop the chicken breasts into roughly 1 to 2″ cubes

Peel and roughly chop the onion. Get 2 tablespoons of the oil good and hot in a frying pan over a high heat and fry the onions until they go properly brown. They provide the unusual colour and flavour; you are looking to almost burn them they should be that brown. Once they are browned drain them of any excess oil and put them to one side.

Peel and roughly chop the garlic and ginger. Roughly chop the chillis (seeds and all) and the tomato. Put the caramelised onions, garlic, ginger, chillis, tomato, mustard seeds, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds (you can leave these out if you can’t find them), salt and red wine vinegar in a blender and whizz them up until you have a thick but smooth paste.

Put the diced chicken in a non-metallic bowl and thoroughly coat it in the paste. Leave it for a minimum of 30 minutes (and upto 4 hours).

When you’re ready to cook get the remainder of the oil hot over a medium heat in a wide pan. Put the chicken and all the marinade in the pan and stir fry for a few minutes.

Add enough water to make a thick gravy and turn the heat right down. Leave to cook for approximately 15 minutes.

Finally, finely chop the fresh coriander and put it in the pan. Turn the heat up fiercely for another 1 or two minutes to drive off any excess liquid and wilt the coriander leaves and then serve.

Forkd gets the elevator pitch treatment over at the PDA blog.  And a stumping great picture of me.  Which is nice (if you like pictures of people in suits looking simultaneously smug and stoned, that is).

I am an Internet veteran. That is all.

Well then.  We’re there.  After months and months of development Forkd is opening up to public registrations.  Feta mark 4 is released today with yet more snazzy new features, including a really rather awesome activity stream, Wordpress integration, RSS feeds, commit messages and much more.  We’ve even managed, amazingly, to bring something new to the game of tagging with the ‘tag brush’ feature.

We’re stopping development for a bit to focus on growing our user and recipe base, but the plan is to start on the next release (Gammon?) in about a month.  If you’ve not signed up, please do.  And please try out some of the tasty tasty food.

Forkd is coming on leaps and bounds (possibly because I haven’t touched the code for months now….).  There’s been another release today (this is Feta 3 now) which adds loads of cool features:

• Blog integration
• No need for Flickr
• Easier to find other people

If you haven’t already got an account please shout; we’re going to open up invites to the public soon, and surely you want to be in on the ground floor?

I can’t tell you how excited I am. We’ve been working on this in our spare time for such a long time now I’m amazed that we’ve actually finally made it. Forkd.com is live, in beta, and ready for your recipes. If I’ve not already sent you an invitation mail me (andy at isotoma.com) and I’ll sort one out straight away. Go for it people!