Metrics are like an onion: full of layers.

A simple question to ask can often be complicated to answer. Or we may find that we need to ask a different question. While it'd be lovely to have one simple metric to understand our business the reality is usually a lot more nuanced and interesting than it first seems.

Averages will deceive. Vanity metrics may wow —  by, say, quoting a total user count and conveniently ignoring whether those users are actually paid, active, or leaving. Growth overall can hide declines in other areas or product lines and vice versa. The people on monthly subscriptions may be doing great, while revenue from add-ons may be declining. New users may be signing up in droves while existing users are churning. Mobile traffic may be different from desktop, online sales different from store sales... In practice, it's the hard questions we're usually asking even if we don't know how to ask them.

It pays to carefully consider what you're trying to learn and to understand all aspects of a business before putting faith in the numbers. And it may make sense to start with simpler metrics first.

The metrics onion

While I sometimes find myself drinking coffee and reading a book with a little background music, the basic idea of this Zen proverb seems sound. Stay in the moment. Don't try to do things at the same time. Focus on what you're doing. Leave the phone in the other room. Avoid continuous partial attention.

This proverb has stuck with me since I first came across it in a NYT article from Michael Pollan in 2009, no longer available online. He later published a summary of much of his food wisdom in his simple, approachable book: Food Rules. Several of them I realised I'd covered in some form here as sketches:

If it's not good enough for bugs, it's not good enough for you

Sketch in the ligne claire art style of Tintin.

When drinking tea, just drink tea

Traditionally, stocks have the flavour and gelatinous collagen-y thickness that comes from cooking bones. Broth was cooked not with bones but with the meat itself. While a jus is a sauce made from the pan drippings, usually from a roast. This simple distinction I learned from Thomas Keller.

Now, you can also have vegetable stock, so some other useful distinctions between stock and broth include that, generally, stock is intended to be used in the preparation of another dish rather than eaten directly like broth. As such, you would more likely use whole vegetables in stock to impart the flavour, but still scoop them out afterwards, while a broth would have cut vegetables ready to eat in the broth itself.

Stock, Broth, Jus

If you like pomegranate but are put off by the prospect of the effort of pulling out each individual seed and spraying pomegranate juice across the kitchen, then this is a fun and handy tip.

a bowl of water helps stop spraying when pulling them apart and naturally separates the light fluffy pith from the seeds, and 

whacking them on the back with a spoon is a surprisingly effective and fun way of making the seeds shoot out.

Deseed a pomegranate

Before getting started in your kitchen both Thomas Keller and Gordon Ramsay picked out this safety tip to stop your chopping board slipping while cutting. Just lightly wet a piece of kitchen towel or a tea towel and lay it flat between the surface and your chopping board. Hey presto! No slipping while cutting so all your fingers stay intact even with those tricky butternut squash.

Stop chopping board slip

Together, and with the help of a small bowl of water, let’s save millions of perfectly good eggs from being thrown away using the egg float test. Egg shells are very slightly porous. Over time, air seeps into the shell making it lighter than it was, and, when it is old and no longer good to eat, it floats. Hence, the egg float test.

Here's how to test your eggs. Carefully, place an egg into water taking care not to crack it, and watch. If the egg:

…sinks to the bottom and sits on its side, then it’s fresh and good to eat.

…sinks to the bottom but perches on its end, then it’s good to eat, but should be eaten soon — it’s been around long enough to get enough air in it to start lifting it off the bottom.

…floats to the surface, then it’s old and likely no longer good to eat.

Word is that it’s not a good idea to wash eggs well before you plan to use them as it removes a natural membrane coating on them called bloom that protects the eggs from bacteria. So best to only wash them when you’re ready to eat them.

Now, does anyone know of an equivalent test for avocadoes?

The Egg Float Test

That classic thing: tomatoes are really a fruit — well, a whole lot of other vegetables are technically fruit too. I do find this way of thinking of it helpful:

Fruit — ovaries developed from the flowering parts containing seeds. They’re basically what grows where the flower was.

Vegetable — other edible parts of a plant. So basically, anything else, with a handy list being: leaves, roots, stems and flowers.

So this makes tons of other common vegetables actually fruit, including peas, avocadoes, cucumbers, eggplants, bell peppers and more. And corn and raspberries are still rather complicated.

Some other fruit and veg sketchplanations:

what’s the difference between mandarins, clementines, satsumas and tangerines?

Fruit vs vegetable

In the UK and certain temperate latitudes there’s a period where the weather gets warmer and the season late for the winter crops, while the temperatures can still be too low for the Summer crops to get going. This period is known as the Hungry Gap — from late April, through May and a little of early June — as it’s hard to pick enough crops locally at that time of year to live off.

Ellen Warrell at Riverford Organic Farmers explains the Hungry Gap including ways to manage it. For example, did you know that “Trucking tomatoes over from Spain uses just a tenth of the carbon compared with growing them in the UK using heat.”

The Hungry Gap

A cheeseboard is a highlight of the holidays for me. Here are some simple guidelines on how to create a winning one that looks and tastes the part.

I think the key really is the range of textures in the cheese. If you’ve got a hard, semi-hard, and soft cheese you’re onto a good start. If you can add in a crumbly and creamy and make sure you have a range of strengths from mild to mature, stinky or blue you’re onto a winner. Then make it amazing by adding complements from the sweet and salty buckets and don’t forget the crackers and breads.

If you want show off, try to cover a range of cheese shapes, colours and milks such as goats and sheep as well.

Also see, Don’t cut the nose off brie and Compliment, Complement, Freeze stilton.

And because you may find yourself curious about it: origins of Boxing Day.

Compose a cheeseboard

This is the triangle between the most key parts of a kitchen — the sink, the hob and the fridge. The idea is that, when planning the layout of a kitchen, you should consider that you’ll be moving between these three regularly. Ideally, if you can get them just a step or a turn away from each other then your kitchen will be efficient and feel a pleasure to use.

Another handy thought is to allow trips to and from the fridge while someone may be preparing food without getting in their way — so having the fridge not deep at the back of the kitchen can be handy.

Plus, there’s a useful secondary triangle to consider between the sink, the dishwasher and your storage. Think rinse, dishwash and put away without having to trek back and forth across the kitchen all the time.

A more recent concept is to think of zones instead, such as the preparing zone, the cooking zone, the washing zone or the backing zone and make sure each of these has everything you need in them for the activity.

And make sure when the dishwasher is open there’s room to walk around it without it getting totally in the way. Also see: how to load a dishwasher well.

The kitchen working triangle

…when senses interact, in sometimes surprising ways. Some fun examples:

Coffee tastes better when you don’t have a loud coffee machine near you, and it also tastes more intense and less sweet if the mug is white.

In the atmosphere of a pressurised cabin when flying, with decreased humidity and air pressure and significant background noise, things taste less sweet or salty.

If you can’t hear the crunch of, say a Pringles potato chip, then it tastes less fresh.

You might enjoy Nicola Twilley’s super New Yorker article, The Illusion of Taste, which has more of the science and plenty more examples.

Crossmodal perception

So, you finish a packet of crisps, or chips, and scrumple the packet up, but in just keeps uncrumpling and tries to blow away. No longer. This handy little bit of origami creates a neat and tidy little triangle that keeps your crisp packet behaving. Give it a try next time.

HT: Dave Barker taught me this about 20 years ago. I still find it useful.

Tame unruly crisp packets

A word from the Sami people of Northern Norway, Finland or Sweden, from ‘coffee’ and ‘boil’, used as a measure of distance for how far you can go before you need a cup of coffee.

Kaffikok

These large bottles are seriously impressive to see. They also have neat names from biblical kings for reasons I don’t know. There are a few more gradations, and some sizes and names are only for sparkling wines like champagne and some not. And there are some that even get significantly larger than the 20 bottles in a nebuchadnezzar, though I’ve never seen one.

Party bottle sizes

I first had a santo libre in Belize and, given how popular cuba libres are, I was surprised I’d never heard of it. Basically, it’s rum + Sprite or lemonade + a little lime juice. I am hereby spreading the word of this excellent drink.

Santo libre, cuba libre

The half-life of caffeine.

There always seem to be more than we need in a bag. This is a nice end for them.

Freeze lemons and limes

The classic “use cutlery from the outside-in” still holds, but I realised there’s a little more to it than that. And I learned what a charger is.

Amalgamation of tips from the cookbook I use most, the Joy of Cooking.

Set your table in time-honoured positions.

With just a few deft cuts of a cork, you too can make a nifty pourer perfect for a straight pour while mixing your drink with air.

A speciality to use with sidra from the Asturian region of Spain.

Make a cork pourer.

Essentially it’s the order of adding your water to your espresso — an americano - or adding your espresso to your water — a long black. If you’re making your own at home, you may notice that a long black seems to make a more satisfyingly luxurious looking coffee.

Other coffee-related sketchplanations: Vietnamese coffee, Irish coffee, half-caff coffee, espresso, filter, americano and the redeye.

Perhaps I should speak to someone about this…

Sketchplanations tagged with food-and-drink