Laptops in the Kitchen

What Do You Think?

 

This came up during our discussion on the pros and cons of electronic delivery for food magazines, and we thought it would be interesting to put the question out there. Do you display recipes on a laptop while cooking, or is that just begging for trouble?

Personally, we've started bringing our laptop into the kitchen more frequently in the past few months. We're finding the majority of our recipes online these days and displaying the recipe our laptop often beats jotting it down or using up paper to print it off.

We set the laptop on a table across the room from where we're actually cooking, so there's (hopefully!) no danger of accidentally spilling ingredients onto the keyboard. Having sticky fingers is sometimes an issue, but we can usually reduce the page size of the recipe so that it fits on one screen, thus reducing the need to scroll.

We also think we'll take a suggestion from Kitchn reader Tiamat_the_Red and start covering the keyboard with plastic wrap. If we had a Kindle or an iPhone, we would probably do the same thing but put the device in a sealed plastic bag.

The only downside to this high-tech move is not having an good system for taking notes or marking changes. We try to keep a spiral notebook for these things, but this can still be confusing when want to make the recipe again and need to figure out how our notes correspond with the online recipe.

Do you ever bring your laptop into the kitchen?