Cooking for Engineers

For whatever reason, I dated engineers and computer science majors in college almost exclusively. Seriously, I can only think of one guy who wasn't a wonk. Me, I was a double major in French and Communications, but I was a geek, too. A geek from Milwaukee, though I tried to cultivate a Bohemian air.

Of course, dating engineers had one big advantage: I was using computers to write papers and socialize long before it became the norm, because the boyfriends showed me how. We're talking daisy wheel printers and 7-inch floppies here. Commodore SuperPets in the E-school lab. Chatting terminal-to-terminal and playing Adventure on the DEC-10.

Well, I'm still a geek, and it has stood me in good stead (witness my masterful bloggiing skillz. I haz 'em!).

So. You might guess that as a geek and a cook, I'm a fan of the Cooking for Engineers site, where Michael Chu breaks down recipes in all their technical glory, talking about variables and chemical reactions and other nuances of the science of cooking. (But we won't talk about my attempts to follow along with his mayonnaise recipe.)

I was excited to see he's hosting a contest of his own, sponsored by HP, to give a lucky winner a laptop computer. All you have to do is take a photo of food with "CookingForEngineers.com" somewhere in it.

So I just spent an inordinate amount of time setting up my shot. Took it and uploaded it, above. Then discovered I'd forgotten to put .com on the end, so I shot it again, below. Sadly, the light wasn't so good for the second one. But I'll give it a go. Cross your fingers for me!
P.S. Can you name all the edibles in this picture?