One of the things I look forward to all week is going to the grocery store with my partner. I would eagerly pick out recipes and add them to our list the week before.  

Lately, I have noticed that our local stores have been short on most ingredients we need. This drawback has led to substituting components like greek yogurt for sour cream, and we have had to change some recipes completely.  

This leads me to think about the Lean start-up term coined by Frank Robinson and popularized by Eric Ries called the Minimum Viable Product. 

According to its definition from the Scrum Alliance, a Minimum Viable Product is a “version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” The main idea for this concept is that a team produces an actual product, which they can further improve upon after collecting feedback from the end-users/clients.  

A further interesting note from my research is that MVPs are often confused with MMFs (Minimum Marketable Feature). The Agile Alliance states that MMF’s are “about delivering value to customers whereas the MVP is about learning about the ultimate product.” With this in mind, I started thinking differently about the foods I was craving to make. What features about them stood out to me compared to my regular menu? What could I serve to represent these features clearly and be improved upon later?  

A few (more successful) recipes I have made: 

Ginger Scallion Tripe 

Current Obstacle(s):   

• Tripe has doubled in price at my local market
•  It does go against my plan of incorporating more plant-based dishes in our weekly menu   

Main Features of the Dish: The tripe (texture-wise, it can’t be beaten. It is tender, chewy, and the ginger-scallion flavours blend so well together when you stirfry.)  

Dish MVP: I used this recipe from mlao77 on food.com and substituted snow fungus for the tripe.  

Feedback and Solution: I would probably boil the fungus in beef broth instead of the recommended chicken broth to better substitute the ‘beef tripe’ taste I was looking for.   

Palabok 

Current Obstacle(s):  

• Toppings consist of whole dishes themselves and might be a bit too much for a party of 2 (plus one dog) 
• Chicharron (very addictive with vinegar) is not doing any favours for our future bloodwork  

Main Features of the Dish: The palabok sauce and the garlicky noodles, topped with crunchy chicharron topping is like a savoury party for the mouth  

Dish MVP: I winged this dish using the memories of my mother making it. I cheated a bit and used the Mama Sita’s Palabok sauce to spare myself the headaches of sourcing annatto powder and a shrimp flavour cube.   

1. I sauteed the vermicelli noodles in garlic to infuse it and topped it with the palabok sauce.   

2. I sliced some hardboiled eggs and green onions to top it  

3. Finally, I crushed up some vegetarian chicharron as a final topping  

Feedback and Solution: The vegetarian chicharron is a little saltier than I expected paired with the sauce, so I will probably put in less the next time around. (Apologies to the Filipino moms shaking their heads at my lazy-palabok. This girl misses her mom’s home cooking.) 

Do you have any covid-edition recipes of comfort foods?

REFERENCES

Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF). (2022). In Agile Alliance. Retrieved from https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/mmf/ 

Minimum Viable Product (MMV). (2022). In Agile Alliance. Retrieved from https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/mvp/ 

mlao77. (2022). Ginger Scallion Tripe (Dim Sum Style). In Food.com. Retrieved from https://www.food.com/recipe/ginger-scallion-tripe-dim-sum-style-358055