The Social

A jar of Google hot sauce and a few dishes from the 'Food 2.0' cookbook by former Google chef Charlie Ayers.

(Credit: David Karp)

(Credit: Amazon)

I was lost somewhere in the labyrinthine corridors of a sprawling Whole Foods supermarket, looking for foods I'd never known existed--Tamarind paste? Daikon sprouts? Pomegranate molasses? It was a humbling reminder that you can't Google everything.

Let me explain: I recently procured a copy of Food 2.0: Secrets From the Chef Who Fed Google, a compendium of food tips and recipes from Charlie Ayers, the ex-Grateful Dead caterer who was hired by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1999. And I was eager to put it to the test. Google has made it easier for me to find anything I want on the Web, share documents, e-mail, read the news, and plan my schedule--basically, Google's made it possible for me to pretend I'm organized. But could the teachings of its former executive chef make it easier for me to pretend I know how to cook?

Chopping up habanero peppers for the Google hot sauce recipe.

(Credit: Scott Kidder)

According to Food 2.0, cooking and eating has more to do with Google's vision of organizing all the world's information than you might think. The young Mountain View entrepreneurs wanted a chef, Ayers explains in a foreword, because they wanted to boost productivity and innovation. "At Google, Sergey and Larry believed that if everyone were eating healthy and eating well, they were going to have healthy, productive, happy, and efficient engineers working for them," wrote Ayers, who left Google in 2005 and is currently in the process of opening a restaurant. "It made sense for them as a business investment, even if there were cheaper alternatives available."

Jade smoothies: cucumber, apple cider, lemon sorbet, and mint.

(Credit: David Karp)

What Ayers brought to the Google table ultimately made the company's free-food offerings legendary, and in the process, more or less destroyed the common wisdom that engineers and software developers restrict their diets to pizza and ramen noodles.

So, Food 2.0 is a ridiculously healthy cookbook in the most Northern California sense possible. There's a page where Ayers describes his devotion to the hippie juice known as wheatgrass, the entire "breakfast" chapter is essentially a catalog of smoothie and granola recipes, and just about everything involves fresh fruits and vegetables. The utter hippie-ness of it all was summed up by the distressed expression on one of my friends' faces as he flipped through Food 2.0 and said, "There's like, no butter in any of these recipes."

That's both good and bad. I'll touch upon the "bad" first. The heavy reliance on fresh produce means that, in light of rising food prices, this might not be the most cost-effective cookbook you'll find. It also means that you'll be working with a lot of perishable foods, which you often have to figure out how to budget throughout the next few days so that leftover fruits and vegetables don't go to waste. Chopping up lettuce and onions additionally takes up counter space, which I don't have a lot of in my apartment, so I bribed a friend with a nicer kitchen to let me hijack it for the day ("You can have all the food you want!").

Somehow, a saucepan and a blender will turn this mess into really spicy hot sauce.

(Credit: Scott Kidder)

Plus, if you're not near a massive gourmet supermarket like Whole Foods, you might have some issues: While most of the ingredients in Food 2.0 are pretty standard, the Latin and Asian overtones of many of the recipes mean that there may be a handful of weird items on your shopping list. Then there's the eco factor. Ayers extols the virtues of buying organic and buying local--the foodie's version of Google's "don't be evil" mantra--but the recipe for "Google Hot Sauce," which I absolutely had to try, involved a few ingredients that I'm pretty sure they don't grow in the States. I'm not sure how to calculate the carbon footprint of tamarind paste from India and pomegranate molasses from Lebanon, but I'm pretty sure Al Gore would frown upon it.

And finally, if you never got over your childhood fear of vegetables, do not buy this book.

Now for the good stuff. The concoctions in Food 2.0 frankly rock. I enlisted a few hungry friends to test out five recipes: the signature hot sauce, two varieties of smoothie, a Vietnamese chicken-and-shrimp dish, and some spring rolls. The recipes, for the most part, are no-brainers as long as you have a few basic kitchen skills; they took me significantly longer to prepare than the book said they would, but nothing blew up, and no one was poisoned.

And the stuff's good: healthy and light but fulfilling, flavorful, and totally quirky. A few eyebrows were raised when I started dumping sliced cucumber, mint leaves, apple cider, and lemon sorbet into a blender for the Jade Smoothie recipe, but the end result was a deliciously summery mix that had one member of the group speculating that it'd make a great afternoon cocktail if you put a shot of rum in it. It was quite the ego trip when my friends, upon tasting the spring rolls, couldn't believe I hadn't turned on a stove in months.

One more thing. That Google hot sauce was really, really spicy. "I have friends from cooking school who make some crazy hot sauces that you have to sign a waiver just to buy," Ayers wrote in a section of Food 2.0 about spicy food. "At Google, hot food--like a lot of other things--became a kind of geeky macho thing. It was their rite of passage, so they just sucked up my hot sauce. It's so hot you wouldn't want to eat it straight."

Regardless, I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would chug the stuff like water if they were told it'd help them on their way to becoming Silicon Valley legends.

SAN FRANCISCO--Here at the Web 2.0 Expo, one of Wednesday morning's talks was to feature Blaine Cook, Twitter's lead architect, talking about the Jabber protocol and "building the real-time Web."

The problem: Reports had surfaced earlier that morning that Blaine Cook was leaving the company. Awkward.

Cook told several blog sites that he was indeed leaving, attributing it to the fact that he was moving to the U.K. But a source close to the snafu told CNET News.com that Cook had indeed been ousted from his role at the microblogging start-up in one capacity or another. In an e-mail to the Silicon Alley Insider, Cook called the departure "amicable," that he was out as of two weeks earlier, and that he would likely stay on as an adviser to the company.

After the panel, Cook told CNET News.com that there were "a number of factors" behind his departure, and that he would be relocating to the U.K. in the fall. In the meantime, he said, he was exploring a number of possibilities. He said he'll probably end up in a role within a U.K. company to avoid the hassle of a semi-regular across-the-pond commute. With regard to the fact that he took the stage at the conference just hours after the news broke that he was leaving the company, he said, "It's been kind of an insane morning."

Luckily for Cook, his talk at Web 2.0 wasn't directly about Twitter. It was also a lecture, not a panel, so there was no moderator to poke around the issue. And it was tech-heavy, with lines of code dominating the presentation screen, which meant that the folks showing up to listen were more interested in geekspeak than gossip.

Bloggers were eager to pounce on the news as a consequence of Twitter's notorious scaling problems, which Cook should have been able to keep under control. But many members of the developer community immediately came out in support of him: Google engineer Kevin Marks said (ironically on Twitter) that Cook "has real-world experience of hard scaling issues that is worth more than any bloviating theories."

And a member of the developer community told CNET News.com that Cook's skills were highly respected and that now that the news broke, he'd likely be inundated with job offers.