‘What I Cooked & What I Ate’ — where the data professional meets the homecook
Intro
At the time of this writing, I own 82 cookbooks (actually more if counting the few non-English titles) totalling about 13.5K recipes. Since January 2017, I’ve been diligently taking note of each recipe I cook from my cookbooks and some online magazines, and I log this data to EatYourBooks.com.
At work, I was introduced to ThoughtSpot which is an easy-to-use visualisation platform which takes in data and outputs visual insights.
With these two tools at hand — data and visualisation platform — I decided to create my personal ThoughtSpot use case to get some insights about my favourite cooks, favourite titles, number of recipes cooked a month, a year…
Let’s dive in!
Background
Eat Your Books
EatYourBooks (EYB) is a fantastic website for all avid cookbook collectors. The team and the community of contributors have indexed about 10,000 cookbooks or 1.5 million recipes for recipe names and ingredients (step-by-step recipes are not included for obvious copyright reasons).
As a paying member, I can add an unlimited number of books to my virtual bookshelf.
This means I have all recipe names, book titles and also all ingredients from my cookbooks (ok, only those that have been indexed, which is really most Anglophone books) in a digital format.
I use that database for two main purposes: first, I diligently bookmark every recipe I cook with the month and year when I cooked it, and second, I use it to search for recipes based on keywords — ingredient(s), book title, author… The latter is quite important — it makes me re-discover my collection rather than search for a quick supper from the Web. As for the former, having a database of what I cooked, when, what book, author, what ingredients really calls for some insights through cool visualisations. The data I enter (my cookbooks and bookmarks) is available for download as .csv files directly from the website. Hurray!
ThoughtSpot
For a while, I’ve been using ThoughtSpot at work — a powerful and intuitive tool for business analytics. My use case was simple — what insights can I get regarding the number of recipes cooked over the months and years? Who is the most popular author and which is the most popular cookbook in my household? Truly essential questions!
After some simple data manipulation, I loaded the .csv tables into ThoughtSpot — and voilà, I was able to search them and create KPIs and visualisations.
My EYB Visualisations
KPIs
Let’s start off with some KPIs: the total count of recipes cooked includes all recipes I bookmarked as “cooked” and it includes recipes cooked more than once. The unique count of recipes cooked doesn’t include repetitions. Having the unique count not so far off the total count does show I like new recipes and I don’t often cook the same thing more than once. This is also related to the last KPI — on average, my output in the kitchen is a recipe a day :)
The Total Books Cooked from includes the indexed titles and to be fair, the majority of my cookbook collection has been indexed.
Recipes Cooked by Month
Let’s explore my cooking habits over time.
The below shows the total number of recipes cooked per month between January 2017 and November 2021. One thing to note is that I haven’t found a way on EYB to tag a recipe as cooked more than once a month, i.e., the below shows unique count of recipes.
Unsurprisingly, 2020 was a big year in my kitchen and one month where there’s a huge spike is June 2020 when things had started opening up and I was eager to share my food with friends.
Let’s explore this observation further: ThoughtSpot allows you to drill down into a certain event, in this case I was curious what authors I’ve been mostly cooking from in June 2020. The graph below illustrates this — mostly Meera Sodha and Yotam Ottolenghi. The former is not surprising since I had just recently bought my copy of Fresh India: 130 Quick, Easy and Delicious Vegetarian Recipes for Every Day, but what about Ottolenghi? I’ve got several books from him, so let’s see which were the most popular titles I re-discovered that month.
OK — that’s Plenty, a book that celebrates the humble veggies by creating so many mouth-watering dishes that the mindful eaters would especially enjoy.
Another way to visualise the time series from above is in terms of growth rate which compares one month with the preceding one, for instance, the 200% spike in August 2019 means in that month I had cooked twice as many recipes in addition to what I had cooked the prior month.
Last, I was curious to see whether I had certain “phases” where one month was dominated by a particular author. So let’s see a chart of the total cooked by month, in the last 6 months, coloured by author.
October is dominated by Ottolenghi & Noor Murad — this is not surprising since end of September they published their new cookbook Ottolenghi Test Kitchen and I can’t put it down! It has become my new favourite :) Since they co-authored the book, 32 recipes cooked from Ottolenghi include the 31 recipes cooked from Noor.
May, June and July also have a clear leader and this is Yasmin Khan with two of her amazing books Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories from the Eastern Mediterranean and Zaitoun: Recipes and Stories from the Palestinian Kitchen.
Next, let’s explore my data based on popularity.
Most Popular Cookbooks/ Authors/ Recipes
Top cookbooks
The top 20 cookbooks are ranked by the unique count of recipes I cooked from. Ottolenghi Simple leads the way with 66 recipes, followed by Ottolenghi’s Sweet (yep, I’ve got a sweet tooth!) and then by Falastin, authored by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley. Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love is the 11th most popular one today but I’m sure it’s on the path to outrank Sweet and Simple.
Another way this could be calculated is not in terms of unique counts, but rather total counts as there are some classic recipes I like making over and over again.
Top Authors
What about the most popular authors? Similarly as before, I looked at the unique count of recipes cooked from that author. Yotam Ottolenghi has a clear lead — so far I’ve cooked 362 of his recipes! That’s some money well spent! I was surprised to see Nigella Lawson after Jamie Oliver since I much prefer her style but I guess this is due to her very meat-friendly recipes which is something I try to keep more occasional.
Top Dishes
What about some family classics?
The curried lentil soup, pizza bianca and the root veg pies are all spectacular Ottolenghi dishes. Pizza bianca is featured here thanks to my kids who declared it best pizza ever!
The carrot and walnut cake is another Ottolenghi classic, which my husband, a true carrot cake lover, declared “better than his mum’s carrot cake”.
The Celebration cake (Ottolenghi again) is my definition of a fantastic not too complicated dessert that will surely wow the guests.
The grand strawberry mousse cake is *not* from Ottolenghi but rather from the amazing Linda Collister and her book The Great British Bake Off: Perfect Cakes & Bakes to Make at Home. This has become a tradition for my son’s birthday when we start getting first fresh seasonal strawberries.
Most Popular Ingredients
As I said at the beginning, EYB includes the ingredients of all recipes, so why not exploring which are the most popular ingredients in my kitchen. The below is ranked by the count of recipes I’ve cooked containing those ingredients. Some of these are not an actual representation of what happens in practice. For instance, I’m one of those people who find coriander soapy, so no coriander has ever been allowed in my kitchen!
Seeing sugar as 6th most common ingredient was a suprise — I do like baking but didn’t expect it to come near the top.
That’s all I have for now. Thanks for reading and in case you’re wondering — tonight we’re having chickpeas cacio e pepe from Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love.
Thanks for reading!
