Oatmeal and Heather Graham?

Wait… why did she drop by for breakfast with oatmeal? Hmm…

Don’t worry, Heather Graham is not actually involved here… Let’s talk about the “hazards” of oatmeal, instead.

Do you enjoy oatmeal in the morning?

Well, I actually do… but I tend to spiffy it up a bit to make the arguably-quintessential morning-like quick meal into something more extravagant. Adding things like milk, fruit slices or bits, syrups, sweet sauces, even cream of rice or wheat in the mix, will make it a more substantial yet flavorfully-fun morning snack… or even a small meal.

So, I decided to toss in graham crackers into oatmeal.

Folks: beware! Many people tend to use one (1) cup of water per 1/2-cup of oatmeal. A graham cracker will act like a sponge and deprive your oatmeal of the water that prevents it from caking; you will need to compensate for the addition of graham crackers with additional water. Rather than attempt to guess at a precise amount, gently trickle in your water (I tend to prefer hot, boiling water) into your oatmeal until the water level is covering the graham crackers (which should be initially dry before adding) and wait for the ‘crackers to draw in the moisture.

Then, enjoy!

The Setup

Memorial Day is coming soon, and you’re the one tagged with putting together this year’s fantabulous weekend chowdown extravaganza. Sure, you were thinking about doing the typical ‘dogs ‘n ‘slaw… but your buddies have already called up and complained about the debacle a couple of years ago, when you ran the op and did the same thing.

Oops.

The Premise

So it’s time to up your game, but you’re not really trying to go out of your way to acquire expensive, crazy ingredients from all corners of the globe. And as for recipes, you know you need something much more focused than Google [GOOG] searches.

So, what to do?

You need something that lets you tap into the various recipe datastores out in the Internet, but you need something that saves you time searching, with more specific search results than what you would get with a generalized search engine.

The Action

RecipeBridge is a specialized PHP-based search aggregator that allows you to search for recipes based upon ingredients, kind of recipe, or kind of meal that you are interested in.

For instance, let’s say you are interested in searching for recipes of this Memorial Day weekend.

"Main" recipes results

You’ll notice on the right margin that the site also keeps track of your recent searches and provides a list of further terms to append to your current search.

You’ll also notice there are tabs on the results page, where you can go with “Gourmet Results”, which present much more advanced recipes, as well as try an “Ingredients Search”, a separate search type where you input the ingredients you do have to see what you can try to accomplish.

Gourmet recipes results

There’s even a filter for the quantity of ingredients, so you can try to whittle down the complexity of the recipes, material-wise.

Filtering by ingredients...

So, give it a shot, and see what kind of recipes you’ll unearth.

After all, you’re running out of time, and the hungry peeps are starting to gather…