About

Cameron McEfee

I’m Cameron McEfee, a former creative director turned indie software developer. My exposure to cooking started with my parents, who worked professional baking and cooking jobs in their early years. In college, I started learning to cook on the theory it would be an attractive quality to a potential partner, but then fell in love — with recipes.

While many cooks eventually settle into a handful of favorites or just make things up as they go, I’ve found following new recipes motivating. New foods, new tricks, and so much scrolling past ads and soliloquies. I cook daily, and when life allows, 1–2 of those recipes are new to me each week.

The scale

Over time, I adopted a simple 3-step scale: it’s either fine, great, or not worth making again. There’s no five-star nonsense here.

great Looking forward to making it again.

fine Would eat it again.

meh Either a bad recipe or a bad result.

Byte size reviews

I eventually started sharing my ratings and, with them, comments explaining my thinking or the tweaks I’d made. This led to working within the constraints of the platforms where I shared.

Back in the glory days of a certain avian-inspired microblogging platform, the constraint was 140 characters. I loved the challenge of expressing ideas in such a small space. Here, instead of characters, I measure in bytes — I work with software after all. It keeps the reviews short, and special punctuation costs extra. Let this be a lesson about letting a pun dictate the name of your website.

If you also enjoy following recipes, I hope you find my reviews entertaining.

— Cameron