I want an ice cream sandwich cookie crumb cake. That is, a cream filling sandwiched by two ice cream sandwiches (an ice cream sandwich being ice cream sandwiched between cookies), like a sandwich cookie where the cookie part is made of crumb cake made of cookie crumbs.
I envision a world where food algebra has opened new doors in both economy and flavor. You can do any math you want following the basic structure rules of food, although the naming can get confusing and may have to be reduced/factored.
You can do for example: (ice cream sandwich cookie crumb cake)(pie) = A pie featuring ice cream sandwich cookie crumb cake.-- Spacecoyote, Oct 29 2008 The Sandwich Sandwich The_20Sandwich_20Sandwichby [wagster] [Jinbish, Oct 29 2008] I admire the combination, [Sc], and would give you some tasty pastry... except for the idea by [wagster] (linky). I like your idea slightly better though as it involves ice cream and cookies and cream.-- Jinbish, Oct 29 2008 Hmm, you've got me thinking...ice cream cookies! Cookies made out of ice cream...is that possible? Perhaps freeze-dried ice cream would work. I suppose mathematically that would be (cookie dough ice cream) ^ -2 (2 because cookies are cookie dough squared, and negative because ice cream cookies are the reciprocal of cookie ice cream), then we can substitute ice cream cookies for cookies in the original expression.-- Spacecoyote, Oct 29 2008 Your conjecture that 'ice cream cookies are the reciprocal of cookie ice cream' is just based on the idea that c|i|c . i|c|i = identity. However, we haven't defined the set we are using so that isn't necessarily true (think of matrices: not every matrix has an inverse).
Another problem is that we're getting dangerously close (if not beyond the threshold) of a 'recipe', which, as you know, is not much of an idea... So careful now!-- Jinbish, Oct 29 2008 [marked-for-deletion] recipe - even though it does sound tasty-- hippo, Oct 29 2008 Don't look at me [Sc]!<makes for the door>-- Jinbish, Oct 29 2008 I make the rules, it isn't conjecture...IT'S THE LAW! However the laws of physics w/r/t to food, i.e. gravity although not restricting the mathematics themselves, prevent me from, say, building a steeply leaning tower of pizza that doesn't fall over, or ice cream that never melts, even though I can work out the math for those. They may be theoretically defined but are regrettably unobtainium.
This transcends the realms of recipe, being at worst a meta-recipe.-- Spacecoyote, Oct 29 2008 Yes, but the idea here is an ice cream sandwich cookie crumb cake. If you were to propose instead a food algebra (with the concomitant food algebra recipe book, food algebra diet, food algebra wipe-clean kitchen calculator, food algebra playing cards, food algebra TV show, etc.) and explain how this food algebra works and set out its basic rules and axioms, using the cream sandwich cookie crumb cake as an example, then that would be OK.-- hippo, Oct 29 2008 Didn't I?-- Spacecoyote, Oct 29 2008 <turns back from door> And watch out for the notation used in the Sandwich Sandwich idea - you could use it in a complementary fashion to further elaborate on your food-algebraic conjectures.-- Jinbish, Oct 29 2008 It's hard to imagine any food combination that would totally avoid the mfd recipe trap...-- xenzag, Oct 29 2008 Just rename this to "Food Algebra", switch the order of the paragraphs to be 2 3 1, and smooth out the transitions a bit.
I'm not quite sure those rules are well-defined, though - I'm not sure I'll know what it means to be a carrot made out of tea. When do you apply temperatures, when construction principles? This needs more research. (Hungry now.)-- jutta, Oct 29 2008 *food algebra* does sound rather cool! It would get my vote. Bravo [jutta]!-- xandram, Oct 29 2008 Well I'll do that if I can get the theory fleshed out more, which is kind of what the discussion is for.
The basics we work with are the man-made food types, e.g. cake, cookies, sandwich, etc. Sandwich is a special case, because its a verb, a noun, and an adjective, you can sandwich anything, and you can iterate the sandwich process infinitely (which is why The Sandwich Sandwich, a subset of this idea, worked out so well). Sandwich cookie is a special case of cookie, the sandwich here is an adjective. Also things get more complicated when you take into account that the burrito is just a special case of sandwich.
[jutta], you bring up a good point about the tea carrot. Natural food objects are immutable, you cannot make an apple or a carrot, you may make something that resembles a carrot, but only a carrot is a carrot. Man-made food types on the other hand are more loosely defined, you can make a pie out of anything, so long as the final product meets the definition of a pie.
Also, the state of objects is important, as some transformations would require changing state, such as the example of changing tea (a liquid) into carrot (a solid). You can only make a liquid into a solid by freezing it, but that doesn't just make it a solid, it also makes it cold and frozen. Similarly, you can't liquefy a solid without adding something to it to dilute it, at that point it gets fuzzy whether that is really a liquid or just a suspension or something, the mathematics then have to take into account the dilution, dilutant, blender setting, time, etc, the mechanics of which have not been satisfactorily explored. Unfortunately my skills in this matter are lacking and it could take many years of research and much funding (blenders don't buy themselves).
I don't want to mess with the ordering as it stands much yet, until I get more to write about. As it is, it is almost like one of those story ideas (where the idea is presented within a short story, for example, as UnaBubba's Roland saga).
This is really all just based on a word game me and my friends have played for ages, the Weird Al Gore Vidal Sassoon Salon Saloon debacle just reminded me of it, and thus this idea came, late at night.-- Spacecoyote, Oct 29 2008 //You can only make a liquid into a solid by freezing it//Not true - there can be a chemical change cf. glue or resin or if we are talking foodstuff then jelly.
//Similarly, you can't liquefy a solid without adding something to it to dilute it//The inverse of the above case, you can melt a solid such as chocolate.
As far as immutable foods are concerned, then you just define a set of base elements; perhaps you could devise a periodic table of foods? Carrot Soup = WP-C5 {Carrot Soup = water, potato and 5 cvarrots [sic]}
*Anyway*, on a side note, two friends of mine once entered into a debate solid/liquid food, i.e. what constitutes a drink and what constitutes a drink. Specifically, is soup a food or a drink? Examples such as broth, noodle soup, and cup-a-soup where bandied about until a stalemate was agreed: soup is unfood (being a food but also not a food much like a zombie is alive but not alive).-- Jinbish, Oct 29 2008 random, halfbakery