The new user page led me to contemplate our tag pages. In looking them over, I found a number of tags that could use some explanation of when to use which one.
Rather than starting the individual tag wikis for each tag, I figured I'd take the questions to meta and consolidate them. (I'd be happy to write wikis when I know what the community consensus is.)
- What is the difference between preparation and cooking-techniques? Based on usage so far, there is definitely overlap. However, I feel that there might be a useful distinction to be made between general setup (mise-en-place?) before you start applying heat and what happens after you start applying heat -- questions about braising versus boiling, for example.
- culinary-uses appears to be used for two different types of questions. One is about "I've got this weird ingredient. What's it good for?" The second type of question has to do with leftovers: "I bought this for a particular recipe. How can I store it/use it in different recipes before it goes bad?" There is also an overlap with the ingredients tag, as in the chickpea flour use question. Could we eliminate ingredients altogether?
- recipe-problems has significant overlap with preparation in questions such as How to cook grass-fed beef and How to cook rice noodles for Vietnamese dishes. Would it be possible to separate out the tags?
- What is the difference between seasoning and spices and herbs? Could we set up spices and herbs as special cases of seasoning? Or could we simply create seasoning-spices and seasoning-herbs?
- Similarly, might it make sense to create cookware-cast-iron and cookware-pan (and any others) instead of separate tags for cookware, cast-iron, and pan?
- The basics tag bothers me, since I'm not sure that everyone would have the same definition of "basics." However, I'm not sure if there would be a better alternative.
- canning and freezing should probably be subsest of food-preservation (as in food-preservation-canning).
- We could choose to do the same thing with the individual fruit and vegetable tags. That way, we'd have fruit-apples, fruit-oranges, and vegetable-spinach. This would mean that anyone searching for vegetable would find all of the questions that only have spinach listed.
- Could thai-cuisine be a synonym of asian-cuisine? (Any other cuisines that could be merged? Italian and Mediterranean?)
- Could there be a meta-category that includes all special cases of cooking for restricted diets? This would incorporate kosher, gluten-free, allergies, kosher and so on. Or should this be something that's simply mentioned in the tag wiki? (If you're interested in substitutions or cooking for other diet types, check out these tags.)
Sorry for the long post, but with 11 pages of tags, there's a lot of questions that I wanted to ask. I've numbered the questions, and will make them into links to each of the topics as they get answered.
preparation
tag: it should mean food preparation, but instead has become an overly-broad meta-tag. See: meta.cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/970/…