The Dish on Delicious (and Del.icio.us)

Today’s Tech Savvy Guest is Gina von Esmarch. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Gina is a fourth generation San Franciscian, whose family as successfully run one of the City’s oldest fine dining restaurants at Fisherman’s Wharf — Alioto’s #8, founded in 1925. She’s also a tech savvy mom who takes delicious to a new level with my new favorite cookbook, Taste This!

Del.icio.us, pronounced simply ‘delicious,’ may very well be a new item on the menu. For the web-blogger-Twitter type foodies, this post may conjure up feelings of ‘leftovers’ but I’ll risk it and suffice to tell those non or newly-techie food lovers that del.icio.us is web bookmarking on steroids. Instead of ‘bookmarking’ a url with a Web browser (Google, Firefox, Safari) you can book mark or ‘tag’ it with del.icio.us.

Why the drama to change things now?

Well, del.icio.us keeps tabs of how many individuals bookmark each site and posts the most popular websites on its home page. This is the concept of social bookmarking- benefiting from the collective whole, kind of like the ‘hive’ mentality in Star Trek re:Borg. The A-B-C’s are that you set-up a free account, you get a personal page for storing Web bookmarks and a bit of room to make notes and sort links using classification ‘tags’.

For the cooks and kitchen-mavens/kitcheners, this is an indispensable organizing tool. So for example, if you are into Mexican dishes, you can build a library of the links you’ve been collecting. To take it to the next level, you can then ‘tag’ or ‘mark’ relevant words like ‘cilantro’ or ‘chipotle’ and others can do the same – cool feature warning – del.icio.us will let you know about others who have ‘tagged’ the same words.

While my Mother may not agree, I am a believer that you can happily commingle food and technology. Is it perhaps a double entendre that delicious (as in simply tasty morsels) and del.icio.us (as in tasty links) are pronounced the exact same way? I think not!

My biggest fear is that I am so addicted to technology that I may spend the majority of my ‘free time’ (read: does not exist) linking to recipes rather than making them. I can’t be a huge tease and leave you only with a tech story, so how about I give you the ‘dish’ on a fun sit down meal photo guide for your friends/family from my cookbook, Taste This!

• Hamburger Loaf
• Zucchini sauté
• Chocolate Pecan Turtle Cake

Back to the tease, for those recipes….you’ll have to order online!

Gina lives North of the Golden Gate Bridge with her husband, two children and dog. To get a copy of her book, Taste This!, go to www.bowllicker.com. Gina has also written a guest post for Being Savvy Washington DC where you can learn why cooking at home is the new chic.