Rather excitingly, we’re also now open for contributions! As I mentioned last month, I’d started posting food preparation suggestions. If you know any food tips, here’s your chance to share them with fellow chefs. Write a post explaining the best way to slice onions (for example) and we’ll publish it alongside the serving size information for all related food. Even if your technique seems is really simple and obvious (like grating zest) chances are that someone has been doing it the hard way for years. I know I learned an incredible number of tricks from Ready Steady Cook when I was a student.

Here’s how it works in ten easy steps.

1. Sign up as a One Serving Contributor. You’ll need a valid email address to get your password.
2. Check your email for the password
3. Log in and change your password to something you’ll remember
4. Write your post.
5. Upload pictures, if you like.
6. Choose your category - Articles, Recipes or Tips.
7. In the tags box, type in the name of the food that your tip relates to. If we already have a serving size for that food, it will show up in a clickable list. If not, no worries. We’ll add it soon.
8. Click on Submit.
9. We’ll give the post a quick skim and approve it - it’s not that we don’t trust you but sadly, there are spammers all over the Internet these days.
10. Your tip will be displayed for all our visitors.

Easy, no? If you want more info on how the posting section works, check out WordPress Codex - Writing Posts. I’ll publish an FAQ soon with a privacy policy and guidelines - in the meantime, drop any questions in the comments here or use the contact form to get in touch with me.

Finally, if you like to share recipes then here’s the perfect website for you. I discovered Forkd last week, a brilliant new site that lets people share recipes and photos. My Forkd profile page has a few recipes that I’ve posted and I’ll be writing more as soon as I get around to actually measuring those ingredients ;) Add me to your favourite chefs if you sign up.

Fruit and Vegetables

Common wisdom says you should eat at least five servings of fruit and vegetables every day. Problem is, how big is a serving?

According to the World Health Organisation, adults should eat a minimum of 400g (14 ounces) of fruit and vegetables every day to help stave off chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity.

In other words, one serving or portion of fruit and vegetables is 80 grams. That’s 2.8 ounces. Eat five portions every day and you’ll hit your daily target.

Great. But what’s that in real terms?

Ah, now you’ve hit the crux of our site. Have a look around. You’ll find photos of one measured serving of all kinds of fruit and vegetables, along with their calorie counts, glycaemic load and a load of other useful information. Here are some to get you started:

• One Serving of Tangerines
• One Serving of Pepper (Capsicum)

Nuts and Seeds

Nuts and seeds are a huge segment of food. You’ll find all sorts of nutrients in different seeds, so it’s not appropriate to use a general weight measurement for serving size. Instead, we’ve settled on 160 to 180 calories as a reasonable amount of energy to eat in one sitting.

Have a look at these pages to see how different 170-odd calories can look from seed to seed:

• One Serving of Shelled Pistachios
• One Serving of Brazil Nuts

Proteins

According to dietician and nutritionist, Dr Mabel Blades, one serving of meat is approximately 100 to 150 grams of uncooked meat, or 3.5 to 5 ounces. This will shrink depending on how the meat is cooked.

We’ll update this post to include the other foods groups in the next couple of weeks.

What’s new this month? Well, I’ve started posting little food suggestions and things. The idea is that not only do you get to find out portion sizes and nutrients, below each info page will be a collection of quick tips that I’ve come across, some basic recipes and other foodie hints. Hopefully you’ll run into one or two things that you hadn’t thought of doing before.

As you probably know, we’re focusing on veggie-friendly foods to start with. Your newest additions:

• Peeled Banana
• Raw Lentils
• Baby Corn
• Tangerines
• Mange Tout

We now have a contact page. It’s a form linked from every page so if you want to get in touch for any reason, please use it to send an email straight to my inbox. Of course, you can always just comment on one of these news posts to get the same, slightly more public effect.

Finally, food factoid of the month: Latex allergies can be triggered by completely unrelated fruit like bananas and avocados. Crazy world, hey?

Happy Eating!

When grating citrus fruits for zest, make sure you only get the coloured part of the peel. Don’t go all the way through to the white pith; this will taste unpleasantly bitter.

What you need:

• 15-20 raspberries
• 1 tbsp lime juice
• 1 tsp icing sugar

Equipment:

• A food processor
• A sieve
• A bowl

Instructions:

1. Throw everything into the food processor.
2. Blend until uniformly liquid.
3. Strain through a sieve into a bowl.

Nice and simple, right? You can adjust the quantities of lime and icing sugar to suit your dessert.

this week we had some gorgeous couscous that required a little more effort, but not much. i mixed the couscous grains with finely diced red chilli and shallots plus shredded mint, basil and parsley before adding the stock, into which i’d stirred the juice and zest of a lemon plus a pinch of saffron. when the couscous was done i stirred in some pomegranate seeds and it was ready to go.

See more of her couscous ideas at eat the right stuff.

Download version 0.3 ‘Weefz’s Show Post Subcategories‘ from the WordPress Plugins Directory (or see below for version 0.4).

Here’s how it works:

1. Unzip the download into your Wordpress plugins directory
2. Activate it in the plugins management screen
3. Go to your template editor
4. Within The Loop, add the following tag
<?php wfzShowPostSubcategories(’prefix’,’suffix’,’separator’,'parent category id number’) ?>
5. Replace prefix, suffix and separators with the text of your choice, keeping it within the single quotation marks
6. Replace cat_ID with the ID number of the parent category

For example, say that you want to show the post’s subcategories of category 5 in an unordered list. Use the following tag:

<?php wfzShowPostSubcategories('<ul><li>','</ul>','</li><li>','5') ?>

I have used this with all versions of Wordpress from 2.2.1 to 2.7.0. It doesn’t do anything fancy, so should work with earlier versions.

Disclaimer: This is my first Wordpress plugin, so please test it out before installing on a live site. I use it myself right here at One Serving - it drives the links to the “High in” nutrient fields for every food serving size post.

Drop me a comment below with any questions or advice. If you like the plugin, feel free to buy me a beer or healthy juice drink with the PayPal button ;)

Update 8th June 2009: Plugin is now on version 0.4. By popular request, it now allows you to display subcategories without any separator. Just use the following:

<?php wfzShowPostSubcategories('','','','your parent category id') ?>

It’s temporarily available here until I find the time to upload it properly to the Wordpress Plugins directory.