Kris and I are lucky to have friends who love food, friends who love to cook and share their cooking with others. I've often said it would be fun to create a friend cookbook — to collect favorite recipes from everyone we know, and to publish them in one of those cheap spiral-bound fundraiser books.

Kris and I have already begun the process, to some extent, though not in a truly systematized fashion. Whenever we taste something we love — at book group, at a dinner party, and Monday night football gatherings — we ask for the recipe. We've been adding these recipes to MacGourmet, an inexpensive recipe database.

I was afraid that MacGourmet would be pointless, but we actually like it. It's easier than collating piles of recipe cards, or dogearing pages in cookbooks. "The best thing is that you can search," Kris says. "You can say, 'I have zucchini. What can I make with zucchini?' If you have enough recipes, you can get some good answers." I like that MacGourmet lets you tag recipes with keywords, add photos, and note the source.

I also like that MacGourmet lets you publish your recipes to the web. If you've ever followed the "eat" link in the sidebar, you've discovered Recipes from Rosings Park, which is our ongoing collection of favorite dishes from friends (as collected in MacGourmet). We recently updated the list. Here are some of my favorites:

• Amy Jo's beef stew
• J.D.'s clam chowder
• Jeff's garlic-roasted potatoes
• Jenn's beef brisket in BBQ sauce
• Jeremy's pasta with a little cream sauce
• Kris' chicken piccata
• Kristi's banana bread
• Lisa's Greek lemon roasted potatoes
• Mackenzie's cajun seafood pasta
• Marcella's brisket a la carbonnade
• Marla's blackberry and rosemary crumble
• Mom's texas sheetcake

There are some notable dishes missing here. Paul's posole, for example, and anything from Kara or Kim. Also, there's nothing from Craig! Actually, we still have tons more recipes to enter. "I haven't even put in a quarter of my recipes, so it's kind of silly to post this now," Kris told me when she saw what I was writing. I'll just have to post again later when we have everything in the computer.

On this day at foldedspace.org

2005 — Voluntary Addiction   In which a return to one of my former addictions (World of Warcraft) leads me to meditate on the nature of addiction.

2002 — The Mummy Returns   In which The Mummy Returns is so bad it's awful.