Rose Garden Resident

Cover Story

Photograph by Vicki Thompson

Pam Thuman-Commike prepares a recipe that she created and posted on her new website for other cooks to try. The Rose Garden resident says she loves everything food-related.

Good Eats

Cooks worldwide turn to Rose Garden woman for kitchen tips

By Mary Gottschalk

Most people eat to live. Pam Thuman-Commike lives to eat--and cook and read and write about it.

A self-professed "foodie," which she defines as someone "with a keen interest in food, cooking and eating," Thuman-Commike is the creator of the Project Foodie website at www.projectfoodie.com.

It's a website that is quickly becoming the "go to" site for people like Thuman-Commike, and it's headquartered in her Shasta Hanchett Park home.

"We're serving the lifestyle of the foodie, and a foodie needs recipes. They like to interact with other foodies, they like to learn more about cooking, and they like to read about other activities that are cooking-related," she says.

"We're providing all these activities on one web destination."

If you're looking for a recipe that ran in Bon Appetit, you can click on recipes in the current issue or go back through 1993. Or check out current and archive recipes in Cooking Light, Gourmet or Food & Wine.

When you find that recipe, use Project Foodie's Recipe Track & Tag and you'll never have to search for it again.

You can also check to see what recipes other Project Foodie users are tracking, tagging, commenting on and rating.

If you're simply looking for a good recipe, click on any of the more than 50 categories, which range from general such as bread or appetizers to specific, such as lasagna.

If your main recipe for lasagna is off the back of a pasta box, Project Foodie offers intriguing alternatives. Choices include black beans, sweet pea and artichoke, butternut squash, porcini mushrooms and prosciutto and zucchini versions.

Or perhaps you're thinking of an informal fall dinner for friends. If so, you'll find a menu along with recipes.

Not sure you want to cook anything at all? How about a thoughtful essay on coffee? Perhaps one on decaffeinated coffees, the history of espresso, blending coffees or what makes a specialty coffee special.

There are also cookbook reviews; online discussion groups for sharing thoughts on favorite quick meals or why you eat out; and interviews with chefs from around the country, accompanied by one of their favorite recipes.

It's easy to be seduced by Project Foodie and addicted to all it offers.

Lauren Barone, a Massachusetts homemaker with three children ages 4 to 8,and an occasional catering chef, says in the first three weeks after Project Foodie was recommended by a friend, she's accessed it three to four times a week.

Barone says she checks "both for catering stuff as well as looking for something different to cook for my family."

"Its appeal to me is it is a gold mine of information. I like the way it's set up. It gives a wide variety of recipe sources, from the major food magazines to interesting chats with chefs from all around the country, accompanied with some of their recipes.

"It's also a great source for people interested in cooking, but who are intimidated by not knowing recipe terminology. The glossary on the website is very good.

"The component that appeals to me the most is the wide-range recipe search as well as the chef chats and their recipes."

Jason Bangerter, chef de cuisine at Auberge du Pommier restaurant in Toronto, says he first encountered Project Foodie when Thuman-Commike invited him to submit a recipe. After the recipe ran, she invited him to write a piece on whatever topic he thought would be of interest to foodies.

"After seeing my recipe on the site and looking through others, I was amazed by the content. It's very exciting," Bangerter says.

He first shared his recipe for truffle soup along with a charming essay on its evolution and the chefs who inspired it.

He followed that with a thoughtful essay on French cuisine and later a recipe for game sausage.

"I access the site once a week, just to see what is new and what chefs are being featured. Being in the food industry, writing and working with many recipes every day, I don't tend to look for recipes but more for the chefs' stories and articles written by artisans and producers," Bangerter says.

"Project Foodie is an amazing source of all you could want and need and the wonderful thing is that it is all in one spot. You can build a repertoire of the recipes you like, you can read about your favorite chefs, get tips from professionals and even attempt to recreate some of the high-end delights featured by true masters of the trade."

One pleasant experience Bangerter had was at a recent food event. He met the author of another piece on the website when they both recognized each other's name from Project Foodie articles they'd written.

The way Bangerter and Barone use the site is the way Thuman-Commike visualized it.

Now 39, Thuman-Commike was born and grew up in Buffalo, N.Y.

She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science at the University of Buffalo and then her Ph.D. in computational and structural biology at Baylor College of Medicine in 1996.

Utilizing her Ph.D. research on using computers to determine the 3-D structure of viruses, Thuman-Commike founded QED Labs in 1997. That same year she moved to the Bay Area when her husband, Alan Commike, was transferred by SGI.

After deciding to close her biotech software company a year and a half ago, Thuman-Commike says, "The first thing I did was go camping. After that I was trying to find out what I wanted to do and what I was interested in doing.

"In the meantime, I was cooking a lot. The more I cooked, the more I realized there's a problem with the current amount of recipes available everywhere.

"Once you've initially found a recipe and cooked it, if you don't pay attention to where you put the recipe, or if you get multiple magazines or buy lots of cookbooks as I do, the next time you want to make that really great recipe you end up spending lots of time searching for it.

"I thought that was a pretty big problem and I decided I could come up with a solution, and that's how the birth of Project Foodie happened."

Thuman-Commike registered the domain name in mid-August 2006.

"Project Foodie hit me as an appropriate name for what I wanted to do. It's kind of a big project, and foodies are definitely the people who are going to be interested in what Project Foodie offers."

The site has been built in increments.

"Contents started appearing last fall and daily content started in January. Track and tag appeared in mid-summer," she says.

"Tagging lets people categorize and personalize recipes the way they use them," she says.

"This makes finding recipes and tailoring them to individual needs really easy. For example, anytime you see a recipe that you think would be good for your next party, just add a 'party' tag to it. When it comes time to plan the party menu, you simply view all the recipes tagged party to decide what to serve."

Thus far, all costs for Project Foodie have been borne by Thuman-Commike.

"At this point there is no funding for it," she says. "It would be good to bring in funding to make the service faster, prettier and to build more features."

Advertising is one option, but she says, "Right now we want to focus on foodies and anyone interested in and passionate about food."

Given that a Google search of the word recipe offers more than 69 million choices, who needs another recipe site?

"We're publisher independent, so that means we have recipes from any publisher," Thuman-Commike says. "Many websites are owned by parent publishing houses. Project Foodie is a single, central destination to go to for recipes from any published source.

"We also let people personalize recipes, keep track of what they've cooked and we'll be adding tracking so they can view a history and a calendar of when they cooked it."

Thuman-Commike says when it comes to the number of users, "it's not easily quantifiable at this point," but, she adds, "we're getting new people constantly on the site, new people keeping track of recipes and the response has been great."

As for the number of hours she's invested thus far, Thuman-Commike says, "I don't want to know; it's sad. A startup is much more than a full-time job."

For more information, go to www.projectfoodie.com.