Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking
Tried the cheeseburger recipe. Got the question: &quot;The best indicator of freshness for ground beef is:&quot;<p>I chose &quot;(B) Smell.&quot; Because, you know, that&#x27;s the answer (though I&#x27;m not sure why I&#x27;m starting out with a food safety question).<p>I got a snotty response that I wouldn&#x27;t be able to smell things that are in a sealed package, and I should always go by the manufacturing date printed on the package.<p>No. You&#x27;re wrong. And you&#x27;re wrong about food safety, which is really not good. You go by smell, sliminess, color. The printed date is a nice guide but NOT what anyone should be using for food safety.<p>And on top of that, your question doesn&#x27;t say that you&#x27;re not allowed to open the package (which... why? in what situation would you be staring at your package of ground beef and refuse to actually open it?) (Edit: Later on it&#x27;s revealed that this is a quiz about shopping. So a bit of framing&#x2F;context setting is missing.)<p>Now I&#x27;ve completed the food safety and &quot;do you know what lean meat is&quot; quiz, and I immediately go into another quiz about buying cheese. It wants me to say which cheese is hard and how to store cheese. What does this have to do with cooking a cheeseburger? I gave up.<p>It&#x27;s like you&#x27;re trying to suck the life and enjoyment out of cooking. This is boring and nothing to do with what I want.<p>It seems like a knowledge graph the way you&#x27;ve done it is an anti-pattern of actual cooking. You&#x27;re decomposing every recipe into its ingredients and then asking arbitrary questions about each one. Those questions have nothing to do with the final dish, or how the ingredients work together, or the choices you would make in making this specific dish. It&#x27;s just &quot;oh, a burger has onion, here is a random question about the history of onions.&quot;<p>What you need is something that shows how the ingredients interact. This is the opposite.<p>EDIT: I don&#x27;t mean to be TOO harsh here; I like your mission and the effort you&#x27;ve put into this so far. I don&#x27;t think a framework of focusing on ingredients in a vacuum, having people get quizzes wrong, and calling them &quot;Junior Chef&quot; is the way to do it.