Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with menus

Contextual Hell

nam3d — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:27:21 -0800

Can I reorder/remove items in contextual menus (right-click-menus) on the mac using an application/plugin/something similar? I'd like to move some things out of the "more" sub-menu.

(screen shot)

Chow for a Crowd

ottereroticist — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:25:33 -0800

Recipes and tips on cooking for a horde (~200 people). Next month I'll be managing the kitchen for a four-day event for about 200 people. Right now, I need to come up with menus and a food order for simple, delicious meals for a horde.

Emphasis is on fresh, local, organic food (Pacific NW). All menus must include a vegan, gluten-free, nut-free alternative. Budget is reasonable, not tightly constrained.

Diners range from mainstream meat-and-potato types, to adventurous foodies, to whole-food purists. The kitchen is rustic, with propane stove, ovens, and griddle. Refrigeration is limited, as are industrial prep machines (a kitchen-sized food processor is about it, but lots of hands for chopping).

I'm looking for menu suggestions (breakfast/lunch/dinners), as well as general tips on cooking for a large crowd.

What rules of thumb do you use to estimate quantities and simplify/ scale recipes for a crowd? What are some tips for making a rustic all-volunteer kitchen run smoothly? Can you recommend a cookbook with massively scalable recipes, especially for baking? What extra treats and extras can we offer to make our diners extra-happy?

Thanks everybody!

Cooking party menus & ideas?

CaptApollo — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:23:51 -0800

Menu/recipes for a cooking party? Many of my friends are great cooks, and I am pretty darn good in the kitchen myself--we all find great pleasure in the act of cooking. I would like to plan a dinner party where we all cook together in my kitchen, then share the fruits of our labor. Please help me create a multi-course menu that several people (4 or 5) can work on at once.

kitchen is well outfitted with pretty much all the doodads and appliances you could need, but only four eyes on the stove and one oven (non convection)

there's a nice island we can all work around comfortably, but not enough counter space for anything that takes up gobs and gobs of room

no outdoor grill and circulation is kind of crap (I frequently set the alarm off using my grill pan - OK for me, but not a lot of fun for parties)

Obviously, the cooking is the entertainment here, so hands-on food is preferable to delicious but non-interactive food like marinate-and-fire recipes. Proverbial bonus points for autumnal seasonality, wine pairings. Adventuresome recipes are not a problem.

Other hints for making such an event a success, like how to enhance a groovy 'food sensuous' instead of 'worky' mood?

Blu-Ray Menus - made simple[r]?

ostranenie — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:03:48 -0800

I want to develop BD-J / Xlet / GEM menus suitable for Blu-Ray disks but it's confusing... I want to develop Blu-Ray / BD-J / Xlet / GEM menus suitable for Blu-Ray disks but the Java API seems initially confusing, and not many websites agree on just how to implement a menu. Is there a GUI-based BD-J menu development tool I can buy for less than $5000 that will abstract away some of these woes?

This wikipedia article says there are Director-like packages that help author a menu, or even things that take in HTML and spit out GEM menus. But I haven't been able to find anything close to that - just Java APIs and classes and something called Xletview that will allow me to 'preview' a Blu-Ray menu. Am I really just not looking hard enough?

Oh no! Not butternut squash risotto again.

Xurando — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 03:25:15 -0800

As a multi-decade ova-lacto-pesca-vegetarian, I am bored to tears with my diet. Help me revitalize my meal planning/diet. Meat is still not an option. For the past 15 years or so i have been using the same cookbooks and basically the same few recipes. I need something new both cookbook wise and recipe wise. The criteria I want to use is that meals should be relatively quick to make (45 minutes max. and should utilize everyday ingredients. I'm tired of going to the store for arugula or pine nuts.

How do I turn off menu auto-hiding in Microsoft Word?

nonmyopicdave — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:22:19 -0800

How do I turn off menu auto-hiding in Microsoft Word? Somehow my main menu bar "File Edit View Insert ..." got configured to be hidden. It only shows up if I move my mouse to the top few pixels of the monitor in which the Word doc resides.

Action shot.

I have no idea how it got this way and cannot find the setting to restore it to the default location. I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling Word. No love.

How do I turn off f*ing menu auto-hiding in Microsoft Word?

crossbrowser reusable javascript for dropdown that hides another menu when active?

Grod — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 18:57:38 -0800

What I suspect is a fairly stupid javascript question, but one I haven't found an ideal solution for. I four menus made out of unordered lists. I'm using a modified version of the suckerfish dropdown script to make it work in IE (code inside), in one place I want 1 of the four menus to stay open except when I hover on one of the remaining menus. i.e. menu1 is visible. when I mouseover menu2, menu1 is hidden. When I mouseout of menu2 menu1 reappears. I built the menu as four separate lists rather than containing them in a parent list as I normally would because of some tricky positioning requirements that were generating weird effects in IE6 and that, when fixed, made the menus work rather poorly. My current approach doesn't require any css hacks, either, which is a good thing now that IE7 is here. Here is the code to make the menus work in IE:



startList = function() {

	if (document.all && document.getElementById) {

		for (d = 1; d< 10; d++) { navroot=document.getElementById('menu'+d); for (i=0; inavroot.childnodes.length; i++) { node=navRoot.childNodes[i]; if (node.nodename="LI" ) { node.onmouseover=function() { this.classname+="over" ; if (d!=1) menu1.classname+="hide" ; } node.onmouseout=function() { this.classname=this.className.replace(" over" , ); menu1.classname=menu1.className.replace(" hide" , ); } } } } } } /code>

Those familiar with the sfhover javascript will notice the only difference in mine is for (d = 1; d< 10; d++) {/code> Of course, this only works in IE. What I need is something that works in all browsers and doesn't require adding any javascript anywhere in the body. What it should do is add a class called 'hide' to the LI in menu1 whenever the user mouses over menu2 and remove the class 'hide' from menu1 when the user mouses out. It has to work in IE6 , IE7, Firefox, and Safari. It has to not interfere with the dropdown script that is required since IE won't recognize :hover on elements other than anchors.



While I'm revealing the depths of ignorance, I'd really like to understand how to make this work. Thanks!



As a secondary, and far less important question, does anyone know where I can download IE6? I use Firefox and recently updated IE to 7 to mess around. I intended to install it alongside 6 so I could test layouts in both 6 and 7, but I seem to have uninstalled 6. Anyway. Back to the real question.

Navigating a dropdown menu via keyboard with OS X?

ericbop — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 19:01:40 -0800

Every time I need to enter an address in a webpage while using my Mac, I can tab from field to field, but the state field (which is often a drop down menu) gets skipped over, and I have to leave the keyboard to select my state with the mouse from the drop down menu. I hate that. Is threre an extension, either for Firefox (my browser of choice) or OS X in general, that will allow me to tab to a drop down menu, and select from its choices via the keyboard, as I can in Windows?

Rounded Dropdown Menus

grrarrgh00 — Tue, 02 May 2006 08:24:33 -0800

Is it possible to make a Web site dropdown menu with rounded edges? Just wondering. If so, how-tos and/or examples of this in action would rock my universe.

How do you impress your dinner guests?

CunningLinguist — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 05:06:28 -0800

Dinner Parties! I'm looking for impressive recipes. How did you last knock your guests' socks off? A few minor restrictions and links to previous great threads inside. My ideal dinner party recipes would involve minimal last minute rushing around, so while simple-yet-elegant dishes like seared fish or sauteed chicken breasts would seem like a good plan, in fact they are a pain if you have six or eight guests. But I also want dishes that look good. The last time I had people over I made a traditional coq au vin, which was insanely good and involved no last minute work at all, but didn't look very pretty no matter how much parsley I sprinkled.
I found great ideas in previous answers about starters and puddings, chipotle dishes, ginger recipes, Seattle fish recipes, special dinners for two, favorite recipes to impress, Christmas dinner for grandparents and vegetarian entertaining. Looking for more - how did you last make your guests ooh and ahh without spending all evening in the kitchen instead of having cocktails with them?

How much for a menupages.com clone?

banished — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 05:58:04 -0800

How much would it cost to develop a site similar to menupages.com? How long would it take?

Customizing Win2K Menus

squidlarkin — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 14:42:49 -0800

I want to customize my win2k context menus. Google found me this, which is great, but... ... each change I make that way has to be associated with a particular file extension. What if I want an option that pertains to all files? Specifically, I find myself wanting to view oddly-named files as text often enough that it'd be really nice to have a "View with notepad.exe" option always handy.

How can I take screen caps of tool tips, context menus, etc?

jfuller — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 11:50:09 -0800

When making software user instruction booklets for the Windows-based Compleat Idiot, in which you want to include screen captures of absolutely everything the user sees, is there a way to do screen caps of things like popup tool tips, right-click context menus and so forth that close automatically the instant you press a key? Can you do it without installing an additional screen-capture utility? If you have to have an additional utility, what's a good (= lightweight and cheap) one? I don't need any special features except one, what-I-see-goes-to-clipboard.

How do you add an item to Explorer's ShellNew menu?

kjh — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 17:32:29 -0800

I give up! Just how in the hell do you add an item to Explorer's ShellNew menu? MSDN makes it sound easy:

To add a file-creation command to the New submenu, your application's files must have a file class associated with them. Include a ShellNew subkey under the file extension key. When the File menu's New command is selected, the Shell will add it to the New submenu. The command's display string will be the descriptive string that is assigned to the program's ProgID.

Assign one or more data values to the ShellNew subkey to specify the file creation method. The available values follow. [...]

So here's what I have: a file extension ".build" under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, with a ProgID of "NAnt.Buildfile." There's a "ShellNew" key under that with a "NullFile" value attached. (I want to use a template or possibly write a wizard, but I'll settle for getting the simplest case working first!) I've set up a corresponding "NAnt.Buildfile" key to give the file class a friendly name, a default icon, and a couple of verbs (Edit and Build). According to MSDN, this is more than the minimum required, but no new entry appears in the ShellNew menu; however, ".build" files appear with the icon I selected and fully-functional Edit and Build verbs. Figuring this is Windows and nothing is as easy as a couple registry entries, I've searched for some sort of API call I need to make to get Explorer to recognize the ShellNew entry but I've come up empty. Help!

Visitors from the Planet Vegan

majick — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 08:41:02 -0800

Ack, I'm not vegan! But I've got a friend with three kids under 9 who is, and they're coming to stay a few days. This hapless carnivore and starchivore needs your culinary assistance to feed adults and kids. I know the basic rule of vegan cooking -- use no animal products whatsoever -- and will have a chance to make one grocery run before the horde descends upon me, but this is a dietary restriction fundamentally incompatible with my cuisine. What can I make that my (also carnivorous) and her (also vegan) children will all eat, but that will also delight adults? I need breakfast and dinner ideas, since lunch isn't my problem.

Please share your vegan-friendly ideas for family meals that won't cause a couple of carnivore kids to start throwing food at me! I realize I can probably squeak by with pasta and some clever saucework, but I'd like to try a little harder than that.

Food and drinks for a bridesmaids get-together?

jmevius — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 08:13:10 -0800

My fiancée is having a get-together for her bridesmaids next weekend. I've been tasked with preparing food and drinks for the occasion. [more inside] My personal taste leans towards red meat and scotch over ice, but it is neither the time nor the place. So, I'm looking for girly foods. I'm not a master chef, but I can certainly follow a recipe. I'm looking for finger-food type appetizers and at least one really girly drink.

Any ideas? Preferences would be towards something simple to eat while discussing dresses, and the drinks should be something served cold (Texas in the summer, and all)..

In Windows, what determines if an opened document will become a "Recent Document"?

badstone — Wed, 14 Apr 2004 14:41:45 -0800

In Windows (in my case, XP Pro, but this might be general), what determines if an opened document will become a "Recent Document"? In practice, it seems like roughly half the documents I open can be later found under Recent Documents, but I can't determine the rhyme or reason to what makes it and what doesn't.

Reference Cookbooks

me3dia — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 20:25:51 -0800

I'm looking for recommendations for a reference cookbook to supplement my current bible, The Joy of Cooking. Your thoughts? [A list of what I've got already will greet you inside.] - Sundays at Moosewood (vegetarian food)
- Better Homes & Gardens "New Cook Book," circa 1965
- Good Housekeeping Cookbook, circa 1962
- "I'm Just Here for the Food," by Alton Brown
- "The Chef's Secret Cookbook" by Louis Szathmary

I'm looking for good overall reference books, not specialties -- in other words, what book do you turn to over and over again.