Five Collaboratively-Created Soup Recipes

October 22nd, 2009, No Comments »

In our UBC course last Monday, we wanted to teach the students a lesson about real-time collaboration. We divided them into groups of four and assigned them the following tasks:

  1. You’re going to create a soup recipe. Collectively, decide what kind of soup you’re going to write about.
  2. Each of you works on a different section of the recipe. One person lists ingredients, another writes the procedure, a third writes a review of the soup and the fourth finds links to other similar soups.
  3. Open up a Google Docs document and start working.
  4. After you’ve all contributed, review each other’s work and make changes and corrections.

It went surprisingly well–we achieved five apparently tenable (and all vegetarian, as it happens) soup recipes. Here’s what they came up with:

I can’t really vouch for the quality of the recipes, but I thought I’d share nonetheless.

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The Saga of Vegan Marshmallows

November 20th, 2007, 6 Comments »

I’m a pretty casual, uh, ovo-pecto-vegetarian, or some such nonsense. I don’t eat red meat. I have had Jello on occasion, and probably other products that use gelatin–an animal extract–but I guess I’m not quite committed enough to care.

Others, however, are, and I totally respect their devotion to vegetarianism, veganism and other related isms. Beth is one such vegetarian, and she recently wrote an interesting post (with video) describing the saga of the tainted vegan marshmallows:

Googling “Vegan Supreme Marshmallows” yielded this: as it turns out, the company that he been supplying the vegetarian gelatin substitute to the company that made V.S.M. was just lying - they were just selling regular old animal bone & skin-derived gelatin! Which means that I had been eating gelatin! And, to add insult to injury, I was paying $8 a bag to do so! So gross!!!

Apparently you can now get non-controversial vegan marshmallows from this online store. They don’t look quite as Stay Puft as the originals, but they’re guilt-free. Except, you know, for the calories.

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