I am trying a lot of scientifically engineered home-cooked dishes these days, thanks to my husband Mark who recently ramped up his consultancy business. No, Mark didn’t become a chef by trade. His company keeps him very busy. But once an inventor, always an inventor! Now that Mark works out of the house, he’s been concocting some patent-worthy treats with the help of an innovative website called Cooking For Engineers.

I’ve been amazed and delighted with this great site. After all, cooking is a science in itself. But the popularity of this site is in the community of cooks and engineers it attracts to its forums and commentary pages. His site asks, “Have an analytical mind? Like to cook? This is the site to read!”  And engineers are getting busy in the kitchen thanks to the site’s creator, Mike Chu, whose bio page says he has worked as a network engineer, software programmer, PDA hardware designer, computer vision researcher, and, most recently, notebook hardware application engineer.

The recipes aren’t your run-of-the-mill cookbook fare. I love how Chu posts no fewer than ten photos chronologically capturing the science of the perfect soft-boiled egg! And of course engineers can’t resist restructuring experiments, so most of these posts have a dozen or two comments.

As for me, I’m heading home to see what Mark has invented for dinner tonight. If it’s anything like the grilled artichokes, it will be superb!

The days of loose coupon clippings may be coming to an end, as the coupons we used to clip and carry are just about to go mobile. McDonald, Starbucks, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Kimberly-Clark, Clorox and Del Monte and others are all posed to send their customers mobile coupons, either via text messages (with their permission), directing the user to the company’s mobile coupon site or promoting the product through barcode technology where retailers scan the barcodes right from your cell phone as you stand in the checkout line!

This one-to-one marketing opportunity is huge–where messages are customized and localized towards individual’s tastes and behaviors. Today there are more than 230 million mobile phone users in the US; and an estimated three billion coupons will be issued to mobile phone users by 2011, amounting to sales of almost $87 billion.

How do consumers feel about coupons via cell phone? Three-quarters of consumers felt that a coupon would be the most effective incentive to get them to respond to a mobile marketing message and that half would use mobile coupons for a discount at a local store, according to a survey by ABI Research. Similar studies by Jupiter Research show that 30 percent of consumers would like to receive mobile coupons.

A start-up called Cellfire provides advertisers/marketers with the ability to promote special discounts or savings of their goods/services via mobile coupons (opted-in SMS). Some of the advertisers include Domino’s Pizza, Supercuts, EMI Music, LA Times and Hardees’ among others. McDonald recently conducted a regional test of mobile coupons where consumers could receive one of the chain’s new iced coffees for free. Subway is using mobile coupon to drive retail traffic with last-minute special offers. To date, more than 10,000 retail stores nationwide are said to redeem Cellfire mobile coupons.

The Kroger grocery store has entered into a partnership with consumer-packaged food companies like P&G, General Mills and Kimberly-Clark to offer mobile coupons at the end of the second quarter using Cellfire services. The coupons offered will be mobile-exclusive and will be valid for specific store locations.

Other mobile coupon providers include GoMobo, SnapTell and Ugotitfirst. With mobile phones being such personal devices, receiving opt-in savings messages from relevant businesses would be highly appealing.

Best of all in my opinion is that there’s definitely a “Green” advantage to mobile coupons in the potential to save billions of dollars in paper and printing costs!