Cooking with Carrots

Food, coding, and explosions

Published in

tech-at-instacart

10 min readJul 16, 2019

There’s a class on Udemy called “If you can cook, you can code” — absolutely true! What do these two things have in common?

Curiosity: being interested in how things are put together and why they work the way they do
Building from basics: taking simple building blocks and making complex and (hopefully) delightful things from them
Experimentation: trying something crazy just to see if it works, failing, understanding why, and trying again
Science: well, obviously
Learning: you’ll never know everything about either, so there are endless opportunities to learn and grow
Research: you’ll probably spend at least as much time googling as actually creating things

So, if all of this sounds like you, then you have all the skills needed to be both a great cook and a great coder. Even better, I can confirm that cooking makes you popular at home and at work, and coding is both fun and profitable, so really, why wouldn’t you do both?

At Instacart, we cook AND code

I suppose it’s no surprise that people who work at Instacart (they call us “Carrots”, thus my title) are very interested in both food and tech.

Not the ones I made when I was six, but they looked just like this.

Me, I’ve been cooking almost all my life. The first thing I remember is learning to make blueberry pancakes from my mom’s New York Times cookbook when I was six.

I grew up on the East Coast in the 1970s, so except for summers when we picked fresh blueberries, my blueberries came from a can. I had to be careful making blueberry pancakes and muffins (also from that long-suffering NYT cookbook) because they would turn green if I got too much juice from the can in them. Or so I thought.

When I was a teenager we moved to California, land of always-available fresh fruit, so I could make my muffins, pancakes, and blueberry bread pudding using fresh blueberries (from Instacart now), but sometimes my baked goods still turned green. By googling it, I can now learn in seconds why blueberries turn baked goods green.

Learning to code

Also not what I made in college, mine never made it to the plate this neatly.

In college, I took one computer science course and was hooked. I took all the classes I could. I also had no money, so I kept cooking for myself, and my friends. My favorite thing to cook then was my mom’s lasagna and garlic bread, which was a lot of food even for our family of four, so it was a cheap way to have food for me (and friends) for DAYS.

I was surprised to find out how many people I was in school with had never learned to cook. This effect was probably magnified by the fact that it was the 1980s and I was studying computer science so the vast majority of my friends were men, who presumably were expected to find some woman to cook for them. 😏👋

What they probably didn’t expect was that I was also able to help them with their computer science homework. After all, a recipe is just a simple program where you take a bunch of inputs, put them through a processor, and you get some sort of output. My decade of practice cooking made coding really obvious.

Simplicity

What was even more surprising to me was that the most popular dishes I made were also the easiest to make. I’d go all out making some sort of fancy cake that took HOURS and people would be like “oh, that’s nice” and then clamor for my blueberry (there are those blueberries again!) bread pudding, which takes just minutes to put together.

The most crucial thing is just to use good-quality ingredients. This carries over into code as well — use the best ingredients you can find and keep it simple — overly clever code may give you a moment of smug satisfaction, but it is unsustainable and even if other people are impressed with your cleverness, they won’t enjoy it nearly as much as they would some nice clean simple maintainable code.

I got my degree in CS and went into software professionally, so I continued to spend my time in majority-male environments and my cooking remained a way to make (and impress) friends. Now that I work on the Infrastructure team at Instacart, though, I’m in a group of people who are not only skilled technically but also really know how to cook!

#cookingwithjon

How did we even communicate before Slack?

My second-favorite Slack channel (after #instacat) is #cookingwithjon, named after Jonathan Phillips, who sits behind me — he’s a software engineer by day, and apparently a professional chef by night.

Jon isn’t the only great cook or thoughtful, smart, and helpful engineer at Instacart. A lot of us post our creations on #cookingwithjon. After almost 50 years cooking and 30 years writing software, I find I still learn something new about both every day from all of my amazing co-workers.

Here are some samples from the 4th of July holiday week:

1) Egg salad: Enhancing visuals and flavor

First two photos are mine, I would generously say they don’t QUITE look like vomit.

No one said, “If you can cook, you can make beautiful food photographs.” I am here to tell you you can’t.

Tips from #cookingwithjon:
My egg salad photos would look significantly better with better lighting and chives sprinkled on top for the contrast with the dark green.
Egg salad (and salads in general) taste even better with the addition of a few drops of soy sauce for the umami flavor.
You can save time by using a cheese grater instead of dicing the eggs with a knife (there is debate from my friends on this, they feel an egg slicer is better, but I don’t have an egg slicer and I already have too many kitchen gadgets).

2) No grill? Get a Baking Steel Griddle

My friend brought his portable firepit to grill burgers for us for the 4th.

They were AMAZING.

We also sat around afterward toasting marshmallows and making ‘smores.

Tips from #cookingwithjon:
If you don’t have a nice portable firepit, this griddle is great for doing burgers and pizza.
The baking steel is totally worth it, it can also be used it for mixing stuff into ice cream because it’s a great cold surface after freezing for a bit.
If you’re in a tiny condo, a cast iron pan on the top rack of your oven works really well for pizza.
The Bon Appetit trick of cooking the pan for a bit on the stovetop helps a lot with the bottom of the pizza crust.

3) Salt blocks: Tried and failed? Tried and died.

No one died, Jack read the manual and was careful!

Tips from #cookingwithjon:
Be very careful, salt blocks can explode on the grill. Who knew? Now we all do.

Obligatory pitch

If you can’t tell, I love working at Instacart. I’m approaching four years and can’t imagine leaving. If you also love food and coding, come work with me and see the daily updates from #cookingwithjon, #eng-til, and of course #instacat (or #instapups if that’s your thing, the company dogs are adorable too). Instacart Engineering is hiring! Check out our current openings.

Bonus: Simplicity in action

I can’t rhapsodize about them and not share, so here are my three super-simple, super-popular recipes.

Simplest and best garlic bread

Fancier and more expensive than the one I inherited from my mom, but the right idea.

I learned this one from my mom and have never found a reason to change it. Other garlic bread is over-engineered, though I’ll still eat it, of course.

1 baguette (ideally sourdough)
1 stick butter, at room temperature
1 head garlic

Heat oven to 350F.
Peel the garlic and smush it through the press. Make sure to use a garlic press with big holes, those little tiny ones are too much work.
Mix the garlic into the butter with a fork until it’s totally blended.
Slice the bread not quite all the way through, 1/2–3/4 inch slices.
Spread the butter in between the slices. There will be a lot.
Wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil and bake for half an hour. It’s a good idea to bake on a cookie sheet as some butter inevitably escapes and will burn on the bottom of your oven.

Strangely addictive cheesy poofs

These are traditional cheese straws, I make them as “poofs” to make the prep a ton easier.

I grew up making cheese straws, also learned from my mom, but I’ve simplified the recipe. People‘s faces literally fall if I show up for a party without these.

1 pound sharp cheddar, grated
1 stick butter, at room temperature
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1–3 teaspoons cayenne pepper
5–6 tablespoons water

Heat oven to 425F.
Beat the butter with the salt and cayenne. 1 teaspoon cayenne gives it a little life, 3 will make people cry and keep coming back for more (this is the “strangely addictive” part).
Mix in the flour. It will be too dry to hang together, so just get it nicely blended.
With the mixer running, start adding water, a tablespoon or so at a time. Once it starts to pull together into a ball, stop adding water.
Gather the dough into a ball and roll it out on a well-floured board to about 1-inch thickness, or a little less.
I learned to make these using a Mirro cookie press, but this is a very stiff dough and rolling it out is much easier. Use a cookie cutter to cut out little biscuits, an inch or a bit more in diameter. I use the smallest of my star-shaped cookie cutters, which is why what are traditionally called “cheese straws” started being called “strangely addictive cheesy poofs” by my friends. Also the South Park episode.
Place about an inch apart on a cookie sheet and bake for 10–12 minutes — you’ll know they’re done when they poof up and are lightly golden brown on top.
Let cool a few minutes, THEY JUST CAME OUT OF THE OVEN AND ARE HOT, as I keep having to tell people who can’t wait.

Blueberry bread pudding

You can make one big casserole or two smaller ones so you can take one to work and it looks like new.

I had a fancy bread pudding at a restaurant and wanted to have it again without the cost, so I found a recipe on the Web and started tweaking it. It’s so easy you can pretty much NOT mess it up.

1 pound (or thereabouts) of leftover bread, again I like sourdough here
1 quart milk (I always use whole milk, it’s dessert after all!)
1–2 cups sugar (I find the sauce to be enough sugar, but to your taste here, it’s not crucial)
3–5 eggs (you can use anywhere from 3–5 here, also depending on how much bread you actually have, I like it eggier, so I use 5)
Splash of vanilla (or not)
Couple shakes of cinnamon (or not)
12–16 ounces blueberries (I usually use two 6-ounce containers, but use as many or few as you like or have available)

Cut the bread into 1" cubes and put them in a big bowl. I have four of these.
Pour in the milk and let it sit for a while to soak in. It should sit at least half an hour but can sit all day. Stir once to get the top bread cubes under the milk, if you remember.
When you’re (almost) ready to cook it, preheat the oven to 350F.
Crack in the eggs, add the sugar, and add the vanilla and cinnamon (if using). Stir until the eggs are well-blended in, just a minute or two. This is when it’s very important to have used a very large bowl, as it is splashy.
Get a baking dish or two loaf pans and toss in a pat of butter. Stick them in the pre-heating oven to melt the butter.
Pull out the pan(s) when the butter is melted (remember, things coming out of the oven are HOT). Swish the butter around to coat the bottom and sides of the pan.
Stir in the blueberries (try not to smush them, but, again, no big deal) and pour into the prepared pan(s).
Bake 30–40 minutes, until the pudding is set (no more free liquid) and the tops of the bread are lightly browned.
Let it cool a bit while you make the sauce.

Whiskey (or rum or whatever) sauce

Tempering the egg to bind the sauce is the only really tricky bit, and you’ll get good at it with some practice.

1 stick butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup whiskey (or really any alcohol you’d like, or just omit this)

Melt the butter and sugar together. I do this in a 2-cup pyrex measuring cup in the microwave, but you can do it on the stove too. You want to have most of the sugar dissolved, but it isn’t crucial to get this perfect. Turn off the heat if using the stove.
Whisk up the egg in a small bowl.
Add a small amount of the hot butter/sugar mix while continuing to whisk to keep from curdling the egg. Keep doing this until you’ve about doubled the amount you are whisking. Now the egg should be tempered.
Start whisking the butter/sugar mix and slowly pour in the egg, continuing to whisk as fast as you can. Don’t let it cook and you will get a nice smooth sauce that is bound together by the egg.
If using alcohol, whisk it in as well. It should incorporate with a little effort, but if it doesn’t, just stir up the sauce before pouring it.
Spoon up some of the bread pudding into a bowl and pour on the sauce. Store extras in the fridge. Reheats very well, but don’t reheat the sauce, just pour the cold sauce onto hot pudding to re-liquefy it.