Cooking guide for hackers

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Paul

If you are a home working hacker like me, I bet that you have some trouble maintaining a healthy life style. It is so easy to forget about your body when your mind is busy with coding or reading other peoples code. Some of us have problems keeping a nice waistline, others have bigger problems as secondary effects of a sedentary life.

Not long ago, empty bottles of Cola and piles of pizza boxes where an integral part of my room landscape for one or two weeks during some intense coding periods. Fortunately for me, I always revert to more healthy food at the end of my coding sessions. I’m one of those guys that loves cooking a good meal when he is not busy coding, playing or watching some movies. It’s summer now and the market is full of fresh fruits and vegetables, so I have no excuse to eat frozen pizza or preprocessed food.

For those of you that are great at programming but lousy cooks I’ve prepared a twenty minutes meat free recipe in the form of an algorithm.

Required materials:

• 1/2 mid size eggplant
• 1 onion
• 2-3 garlic cloves
• 3 white potatoes
• 3 mid size tomatoes
• 1 zucchini

Algorithm:

• Peel and wash the eggplant, the zucchini, the onion and the potatoes.
• Don’t you dare to peel the tomatoes!
• Chop everything put it in a large saucepan.
• Add some salt (maybe 1/4 of a tablespoon) and pepper.
• Cover the food with fresh watter.
• Add 1 tablespoon of sunflower oil (or better olive oil).
• Boil until the food is cooked (about one hour, maybe less).
• Taste a bit and, if necessary, add more salt and pepper.

Some tips:

• You could add small quantities of water during the boiling phase, just a bit to cover the vegetables.
• Once the food is cooked (taste a piece of potato to check) you can let it boil for a few more minutes until the liquid level drops to 3/4 from the vegetables
• You can serve this food at room temperature.

Chopping and peeling the vegetables should take less than 15 minutes. After this you could do whatever you like, even coding, as long as you remember to check the food every 12-15 minutes.

Let me know what else do you think we can add to this nice and healthy recipe for programmers …