All content - GetMeCooking

Posh Salmon Fish Fingers

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:35:38 Z

Making your own fish fingers is easier than you think, and salmon fish fingers are a wonderful alternative to the usual white fish ones, plus, they are quite posh! by KarenBurnsBooth on 23 February 2012

Tuna Fish Pasta

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:31:13 Z

by RenBehan1 on 23 February 2012

Energy Bars

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:23:58 Z

by Guest on 23 February 2012

Creamy Shrimp and Mushroom Alfredo Pasta

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 22:35:47 Z

by Guest on 23 February 2012

Crispy Squashed Chips

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:55:23 Z

The first "chips" were pieces of bread, which were replaced with potatoes during wheat shortages. During the Second World War, the minister of food wouldn't ration fish and chips because they provided good, cheap nourishment! It is traditional to serve chips piping hot with salt and malt vinegar. by KarenBurnsBooth on 22 February 2012

Minestrone Soup

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:52:30 Z

Low-sodium minestrone soup. by j3nn on 22 February 2012

Chocolate Covered Cherry Smoothie

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:58:40 Z

Healthy, creamy and chocolatey. by EatSimply on 21 February 2012

Buttered Breadsticks

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:53:31 Z

by Guest on 21 February 2012

Christophene au Gratin

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:36:39 Z

by caribcharter on 21 February 2012

Kingfish in Wine and Cream Sauce

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:16:01 Z

by caribcharter on 21 February 2012

Authentic French Hot Chocolate

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:42:50 Z

This is an authentic hot chocolate recipe from France. It uses dark chocolate and added sugar is optional according to the individual's taste. A healthy drink for the morning or just as a satisfying snack. by MaryBrighton on 21 February 2012

Homemade Beef Ravioli

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:34:29 Z

Homemade ravioli with beef & spinach filling. Dough recipe can also be used for plain pasta. by thebrainybuyer on 21 February 2012

Cosmetic Foodology…has it all gone too far?

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:25:19 Z

‘The garden is a woman’s best source of cosmetic treasures’…Aunt Lillian, Spoonbread & Strawberry Wine p75 – Norma Jean & Carole Darden .

Food stuffs have been used as cosmetic beauty treatments and products throughout time in our quest for good looks, youth and celestial beauty. With the rise of the ‘Foodie’ in the last ten years or so, and a heightened awareness of health and natural well-being, the emerging trend of food based cosmetics has found its niche.

With product ranges boasting the benefits of natural wellness, the harnessing of nature’s true beauty, as well as their moral and ethical credentials, cosmetic companies have found the perfect sales pitch for the Guardian reading, dinner party throwing vegetarian wannabe, – politically correct, self-righteous goody two shoes who think they know it all.

Lush, Original Source and Body Shop lead the way with food ingredient based cosmetics with a number of smaller bespoke, organic certified products, brands and companies hot on their heels; a number of food companies and cosmetic companies are even joining forces in the hunt for the next new innovative product to put on the market trying to keep abreast of the competition…but has it all gone too far?

Well, one can contemplate why a person would choose a product containing banana or aloe vera rather than some complicated sounding chemical ingredient based product. Familiarity is the chief reason for the popularity of natural products. Women have more money to spend, and are also becoming aware of the harm that applying industrial chemicals can do to your skin.

A few years ago Nestlé and L’Oreal teamed up to bring us the Innéov range which claims that they act at the heart of the metabolism to deliver global results on the whole face and body, weather this pseudo science holds any truth remains to be seen….in the mean time they’ll keep telling you ‘because your worth it!’.

Beer, a less likely food source for cosmetics, is currently being used by Czech Republic firm, Chodovar, who has opened the world’s first beer spa, which offers ‘beer baths, massages, wraps, and a take home cosmetics line’ claiming that beer is the solution to everything from high blood pressure to dry skin…probably the best beer in the world?…I’m not convinced.

And then, The Cheese Makers Association attempted to target the fragrance industry by creating ‘Eau de Stilton’ and approached Cat Deeley to be the face of the product…What were they thinking?…Not a sniff!

Sea buckthorn is the new darling of the food cosmetic world, this plant grows in the upper reaches of the Himalayas and is rich in vitamins A, B and C, flavonoids and carotenoids and has been used in traditional medicine for ages.

Here is a selection of eight tried and tested cosmetic foods that you may be familiar with which have been used in days gone by:

1) Cucumber – cucumbers are renowned for their beautifying abilities, so rub a slice over your face and neck. It will soften and smooth skin by refining pores.

2) Watermelon – watermelon rind has many of the same properties as cucumbers and is useful for beautifying skin. Rub the inside of the rind on face and neck. It is really refreshing on a hot summer’s day.

3) Tomato – tomato juice is great for oily skin! Try swishing a slice of raw tomato over you face from time to time. It’s good for oily and pimply skin.

4) Potato – peel and grate a little white potato and place it under the eyes. Good for relieving swollen bags and dark circles if you’ve been crying or are just tired.

5) Eggs – egg whites, beaten and applied to the face, work as a tightening mask to draw up wrinkles. Skin can use external sources of protein from the yolk too, as time marches on. Smear on either, white or yolk and rinse off with water after fifteen minutes.

6) Peaches cream & honey – whip up a little heavy cream (1/4 cup, mash in ½ peach, and mix with 1 Tablespoon of honey. Apply to face and leave for fifteen minutes. Enjoy licking your lips!

7) Lemon – to whiten nails, plunge them into the white part of a lemon rind for a minute or two. Also, to get an additional gloss on nails, buff with an old fashioned buffer.

8) Buttermilk – drink it and use it as a mask. It aids the digestive system and acts as a cleanser and astringment for the face.

by Ricky_Panesar on 21 February 2012

Peppermint-Chocolate Sandwich Cookies

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:14:38 Z

Great for the holidays, these peppermint chocolate cookies are sure to please, especially for entertaining at holiday parties. by Guest on 20 February 2012

Oreo Mousse Trifle

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:10:52 Z

by Guest on 20 February 2012

Ginger,Thyme and Lemon Flu Concoction, with Honey

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:08:26 Z

In traditional natural medicine ginger, thyme, lemon and honey have been used to treat successfully symptoms of acute respiratory infections such as the flu and common colds. by Guest on 20 February 2012

Cinnamon Chip Snickerdoodle Blondies

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 21:03:42 Z

by Guest on 20 February 2012

Beef Collops - Sliced Beef in Gravy

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:57:26 Z

An easy and delectable historical recipe that would have been served on Collop Monday, in the week preceding Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. Slices of beef are simmered in a rich beef stock and wine sauce before being served with fried bread, a pre-Lenten dish from many years ago. by KarenBurnsBooth on 20 February 2012

Red Onion and Rosemary Risotto

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:52:38 Z

A delicious red onion and rosemary risotto, which is lower in fat than other recipes. by JessE on 20 February 2012

Apricot and Carrot Puree

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:48:02 Z

by Evie on 20 February 2012

Lenten Mushroom and Potato Soup

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:44:46 Z

Take dairy, meat, olive oil, eggs, and alcohol off the table for 40 days and what's left? The Moscovore takes up the challenge of Russian Orthodox Lent with this delicious Lenten mushroom soup! by TheMoscovore on 20 February 2012

GetMeCooking Recipe Template plugin for WordPress version 1.14 - more enjoyable to use

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:50:33 Z

Just 3 weeks after the last release of our Recipe Template plugin for WordPress and we're giving you more features and a nicer interface to play with!

Step grouping

You liked the ability to group ingredients so much that you asked for the same for recipe steps.

Now you can group recipe steps, so you can have the steps for the cake base, topping and filling clearly listed, which makes cooking easier and more manageable.

Recipe ingredients section

This has been vastly improved, so now it is clear, quick and easy to add and manage ingredients for recipes.

Automatic hiding of recipe information

You asked for information such as region, prep time, cook time, etc. to be hidden if you didn't fill them in. So we have done this.

This allows for cleaner looking recipes, which are easier for your visitors to read.

Insert recipe into post

Now lists recipes alphabetically - making it easier to find recipes you've added, to insert into your blog posts.

Other minor improvements/changes

Fixed an ingredient/step duplication issue (caused by pressing save while the page updated)
Help icons (the question marks) have been replaced
Tooltip help above the question marks has been improved
Fixed issue with deleting an ingredient note

Over 3,200 downloads of our plugin so far - thank you very much! :-)

by Paul on 19 February 2012

Subtle Visual Design Tweaks

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:19:13 Z

Why make minor design changes?

Every now and then we like to take a step back, review things and try things out.

Sometimes we get too caught up in the code and adding/improving functionality, that the visual design gets a little left behind; so we are going through an excercise now of reviewing each page and seeing how we can make them more awesome.

The first step to this process is to look at the overall website and see what minor changes we can make (quick wins). So after a bit of thinking, we decided to implement these changes, which although are quite minor; we think have freshened up the site quite a bit.

Changes made

Removed the ‘Home’ link from the top navigation menu

You can still get to the home page by clicking on the GetMeCooking logo

Replaced the ‘Contact’ link in the top navigation menu with the ‘blog’ link

We wanted to promote our blog a little as it's not something that people would actively seek.

We removed the contact link simply to keep the navigation menu clean and clutter-free, The contact link is dotted around our site anyway, plus we think visitors will look for it in our footer if they want to contact us.

Added a gap between the main content section and the top navigation menu

This makes the site look more modern and less 'boxy'

Added a solid grey background colour

This makes the main content area stand out, to be more prominent and readable.

Replaced square corners with rounded corners to most sections around the site

This makes the site look softer, fresher and more modern.

Next Steps

We are in the process of reviewing the main pages of the site to see how people use them and seeing how we can make them easier to use.

In some cases, functionality has overtaken design, for example registered users now have a number of actions that they can perform on a recipe e.g.:

'Like' on facebook
Tweet
Print
E-mail
Add to recipe box
Add a note
View comments
Add a new photograph

but these options are a little tucked away, so are easily missed or misunderstood. We need to enhance the design to make things clearer, easier and more fun to use.

Suggestions?

We have a lot of work to do on the design, which is why we are looking for a website designer.

Is there anything you find hard to do, find or read on the site? Let us know.

by Paul on 17 February 2012

Snacks delivered through the door - a review of graze.com

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:38:32 Z

Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post. If you use the first free box offer using the code MM6GHCC then I get £1 to spend on a box of my own.

What is graze box?

You get a box delivered through the door (anywhere in the UK) which contains 4 packages of different snacks, a nutrition leaflet and a tissue. Their tagline is 'nature delivered with healthy snacks' so the packages range from dried fruit, olives, nuts, seeds, bread and flapjacks. They have over 100 snacks to choose from.

How does it work?

When you sign up to the site you are automatically set to receive 4 random snacks. You can go to each snack and say 'bin' so you will never be sent it but the default is 'try'. You can also say 'like' or 'love' to increase the frequency of that snack being sent.

There are also filters for non-vegan, non-coeliac and dairy/milk foods if you wish to filter those types of snacks out.

I don't think you can specify what exactly you will get, the best you can do is say 'send soon' but this is not a guarantee that it will come in your next delivery.

When does it come?

You can choose between a one-off or a weekly delivery and you can choose Monday - Saturday. I have had 4 boxes and they always came on the day they said they would. The night before you get an e-mail where you can peek at what you have been sent. The day after your snacks come you get sent a 'rate your snacks' e-mail where you can update your 'bin', 'like' settings etc.

How much does it cost?

It's £3.79 including delivery. Is this worth it? See the next sections on portion sizes and taste to decide.

How big are the portions?

The 4 packets are 12 x 8 x 2cm each. As a comparison, this fruity ploughman's gave 12 flatbreads and enough dip for each. The dried fruit snacks and nut snacks are packed well too. The bread couldn't squeeze in any tighter if they tried however the flapjack I had was 4 small pieces, they could have packed in more, if only it was the same size as the bread (drools)!

Maybe the packets could be larger but then you do have 4 snacks to eat.

Even if they were larger I would still eat them far too quickly, I forget you are meant to snack and graze on them - they are just too nice.

How does it taste?

My local supermarket pretty much just stocks salted nuts. I had some chilli and lime pistachios from graze and I've never had such nice flavours. The same goes for the apple and cinnamon flapjacks, you can really taste the cinnamon.

You can choose some dried fruit snacks that contain a few pieces of dark chocolate - this is the best chocolate I've tasted and so for quality their products cannot be beaten.

You said I could try a free box..?

Yes and remember that it's free delivery too. Just go to here. If that link hasn't automatically given you the free box offer, then just enter the code MM6GHCC.

Are the snacks healthy?

They are certainly more healthy for you than most things you’ll find in an office vending machine. For the nutritional information, check out their health pageo They are certainly more healthy for you than most things you’ll find in your office vending machine. For the nutritional information, check out their health page.

Is It easy to cancel?

I hate signing up to free offers and having to go through hoops to cancel, this site is a charm. Just go to your account and there is a 'cancel your deliveries' link where you can cancel all orders or put it on hold for a holiday. All done and cancelled within a few seconds.

Do I still use graze?

I used them with the free box offer and in January they had a promotion of 3 boxes for half price. I would be happy paying half price but I'm undecided if they are worth it at the full price. I don't snack between meals so for me this was a bad habit to start!

I think their food is great. If they sold full sized flapjacks and large rolls based on their bread recipes then I would definitely buy those for a full size lunch as my weekend treat.

I like the idea of the service as it’s a nice surprise as to what you get each week. It also encourages you to be adventurous and to try new foods that I wouldn’t normally buy.

Over to you

Are there any other similar services that you think we should all be trying? Is there anything similar outside of the UK?

by KevinUK on 05 February 2012

What's new in the GetMeCooking Recipe Template plugin for WordPress version 1.13?

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:50:16 Z

Our recipe plugin keeps getting bigger and better.

In version 1.13 we have made two main changes:

We’ve moved the Dashboard menu’s

We found an issue whereby if two or more plugins are set to use position 2 in the WordPress menu, only the first one will appear. This issue is inherent to WordPress and is described in WordPress enhancement ticket 16856. Thanks to hellquist for reporting it.

So as a result of that, we amended our links so that the ‘Recipes’ link no longer appears in the second position (below ‘Posts’). Instead it will now appear ‘somewhere’ in the top menu, however we have added our GetMeCooking logo to the link to make it easy to identify.

Also, we have added more configuration options to the plugin. Because of this, we have moved the Settings link from within the ‘WordPress settings’ menu, to a top-level menu called ‘GetMeCooking Settings’. This menu now has the sub-menu links:

Do you have a food allergy or intolerance related food blog?

If you do then the second major change of the plugin update is especially useful for you.

At GetMeCooking we focus on the main eight food allergies/intolerances (egg, fish, milk, peanuts, shellfish, soy, tree nuts and wheat), but we realised that there are many different types of allergies and intolerances.

We provide tags for the main eight food allergies/intolerances and now we let you add, edit and delete your own tags. We have done this using standard WordPress functionality, so it will be 100% compatible with all other plugins and WordPress themes.

To do this, simply go to your WordPress Dashboard, then ‘GetMeCooking Settings’, ‘Allergies’.

As well as managing allergy and intolerances in here, you can use this screen to see how many of your recipes are tagged with the allergy/intolerance and then click on the number to actually view those recipes.

Good eh? This is all part of our commitment to making the GetMeCooking recipe plugin (and website) more user-centric, because the more we know about the recipes, the better we can fit the recipes to the individual.

by Paul on 29 January 2012

We now have a showcase page for our WordPress recipe plugin

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:53:18 Z

Since releasing our recipe template plugin for WordPress 4 months ago, it has had over 2,700 downloads - which is pretty good going!

Feedback has been fantastic and we are continuing to make revisions to it and bring out new functionality. You'll be impressed with some of the things we have in the pipeline!

Many bloggers have customised the plugin (using the 'easy layout' options that we provide, as well as the full custom CSS styling that we give easy access to) to make it fit seamlessly into their blogs.

So we decided to create a showcase of some of the most well designed food blogs that use our plugin. From this, other bloggers can see how versatile the plugin is, as well as get some design inspiration for their own blogs.

If you've used the plugin on your site and want us to check it out, or if you have any questions about design issues, please pop us a comment below.

Also, if you're a WordPress theme designer - let's talk!

by Paul on 29 January 2012

The blandness of supermarket food

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:50:09 Z

Going to the Ludlow Food Festival reminded me of another reason to cook. I normally just think about the savings or knowing the quality or just the fun you get from cooking but looking around at over 140 food stalls reminded me of the sheer variety of flavours a recipe can bring to the same meal.

Take a sausage roll for example, in the supermarket all you can get is a plain pork sausage roll with enough herbs to show colouring but not enough to actually taste. Then compare that to a locally produced 'pork, caramelised onion, rosemary and stilton' sausage roll where the meat content will be a minimum of 80% instead of the supermarkets maximum 40%. This sausage roll was the meatiest I have tasted but still had the extra flavours of the cheese, onion and herbs.

Next, when was the last time you bought a 'blue banana' or lavender ice cream? Forget your artificially added strawberry colouring and instead feast upon chunks of real strawberry in your ice cream.

Butter, salted or unsalted? How about garlic, red pepper or horseradish flavoured?

I'm all for variety but sometimes when supermarkets do stock some out of the ordinary items they go too far, cheese & onion or sour cream & jalapeno chilli popcorn? After having tasted them - no thanks! It's odd how I like those flavours in crisps but they just taste wrong on popcorn.

Adding variety to an ingredient also turns some food from something that I would not eat into some really nice dishes, take for example brussels sprouts, a bit boring on their own but great when added with chestnuts and bacon.

What food with a twist on the ingredients have you tried that you would have never thought to make yourself?

What food would you buy if only the supermarkets stocked it? Yes I'm looking at you caramelised onion and stilton sausage roll...

by KevinUK on 13 December 2011

GetMeCooking Recipe Template plugin for WordPress version 1.07 is now available

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 23:26:23 Z

We have just released version 1.07 of our Recipe Template plugin for WordPress.

Improvements:

It is now a lot faster and easier to add ingredients and recipe steps (big improvements here)
Re-organised the 'Add Recipe' screen to make it nicer to use (less scrolling!)
Printing of recipes (see below for more info)
Added more help (mouse-over the blue question marks)

Fixes

A print issue on some web browsers
Incompatibility issues with some WordPress themes
Minor bugs

More information on the printing

We have re-written the print functionality from scratch. Now it loads faster, works on all browsers and best of all give the user the option to print the recipe with:

All photographs
Just the main photograph
No photographs

Note:If you have previously modified the custom CSS, you will need to reset it and re-apply your changes in order for the new print functionality to work properly (this is mentioned in the patch release notes). To do this:

Go to your WordPress Dashboard
Settings
GetMeCooking Recipe Template
Make a note of the custom CSS you changed
Select 'Reset CSS back to default'
Re-add the custom settings you changed previously (only the configuration you changed before, don't paste everything back in)
Press 'Save settings'

How to get it

Updating your existing installation

If you already have the plugin installed, simply update it from within your WordPress dashboard.

Fresh install

Find and install it from within WordPress
Manually download it here: http://www.getmecooking.com/recipe-template and then install it.

Anything else?

Please rate us on the WordPress Plugin Directory - we really appreciate it!

Let us know in the comments below what you like (or dislike) about the plugin and what new features you would like to see. We have a huge list of development plans, but we are listening and often prioritise new features based on the feedback we get.

by Paul on 30 November 2011

Asyra Pro Food Intolerance Test – My Experience and Results

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 15:11:22 Z

I lead a fairly healthy lifestyle by eating healthy food and competing in a lot of sports. I’ve learned a lot about which foods are good for you, which are not so good and which should be avoided, but I have never had a test to see which foods are good or bad for me as an individual. So when I saw an offer (£59 instead of £195) for an Asyra food intolerance test, I decided to give it a try.

According to their website, the Asyra Pro can test for all these things:

Energetic Status of 40 major organs
Nutritional Assessment
Metabolic Disturbance
Dental Profile
Hormonal Profile
Parasites and Infections
Toxicity
Phenolic Sensitivity
Menstrual & Menopausal Problems
Emotional Stressors
Trace Minerals
Vertebral Profile
Miasm Influence
TMJ Stress
Constitutional Influence
Neurotransmitter Disturbance
Environmental Sensitivity
Food Intolerance, Sensitivity and Allergy
Vitamins and Minerals
Cranial Suture
Dental Causation
Herbs
Heavy Metals
NAET
… and much more!

Here is a video demonstrating the use of the Asyra.

My session was a three part process

Answered a few questions (what do I eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, do I get stressed, do I take medication or supplements, have I had any ill health – that sort of thing)
Held 2 metal rods while an electric current was passed through my body – I didn’t feel anything while this was being done. This was done twice. They used an Asyra Pro device
A brief run-through of the results, which were then e-mailed to me

What I liked about the Asyra test:

The session was that the test is very quick, simple and non-invasive (i.e. you don’t have to roll up your sleeve to get poked, prodded, pricked or jabbed with a needle!)
The person who conducted the test seemed quite knowledgeable about food and intolerances , he said he had conducted over 1,000 tests over the past year
The session only took around 20 minutes (mostly talking) and it didn’t feel rushed

What I didn’t like about the Asyra test:

The test seemed too easy – I mean, all it did was pass an electric current though my body. It seemed far too fast. I’m not a doctor and I don’t know any detail behind the science of the test (only what I’ve read online, which is an overview), but it just felt ‘too easy’ – having said that, it is a medically approved device and is claimed to have a very high accuracy
The technology is based on bio-energetic medicine and (according to their website) ‘thousands of years of development in Chinese medicine and over 50 years of technology refinement’. I am not a fan of traditional Chinese medicine
It claims to be able to test for ‘too many’ things in my opinion
I’m glad I didn’t pay the full price of £195!

My Asyra test results

Helping You Understand Your Asyra Report
Foods (this lists the food intolerances the Asyra has detected I have)
Vitamins (this lists which vitamins the Asyra suggests I am deficient in)

Some points

Intolerance to cucumbers: I have cucumbers most weekdays (only about 5 slices, in the Pret a Manger chicken salad). The practitioner said I should try not eating any for a week
Blueberries: A few years ago I went through a ‘summer-phase’ of eating a lot of blueberries – to snack on while at work and every day at home. I didn’t have any obvious adverse reactions
Baking powder: I don’t recall ever having an adverse reaction to cake – only a compulsion to eat more!
Connective Tissue Resonance: I currently have a bad knee due to a sports-related injury
Enzyme Deficiencies (generic): The practitioner said I may lack some enzymes needed to fully break down and digest pasta. I sometimes get indigestion if I eat a lot of pasta, so I could try eating pineapples (or pineapple juice) or taking supplements

What next?

It’s too hard to avoid treats at work and at home between now and Christmas (the worst time of the year for people to try to eat sensibly), so I’m going to write up a ‘cue card’ for myself and ensure that I stay away from foods that this test says may be bad for me between January and March.

Find out more about the Asyra Test

The Asyra website (in particular their FAQ page) is a good place to start.

What else?

What wasn’t explained to me is what effects (if true) these intolerances might have on my body.

What do you think? If you have had an Asyra test, what did you think of the results? Did avoiding food that it says you are intolerant to result in any noticable difference to your wellbeing?

Also, I have e-mailed them to ask if the Asyra results can be output in a format other than PDF, but they haven’t replied. Please let me know if you know!

by Paul on 27 November 2011

Thai Fishing Village

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 15:01:12 Z

THESE PRAWNS WERE THE SIZE OF SMALL LOBSTERS

This was an experience of a lifetime to see how the local fisherman lived in a small village about an hour from Bangkok Thailand. With our private guide, we took a small boat out onto the ocean at low tide where the oyster beds were, as well as women using colanders to dredge for cockles in the shallow water.

The monkeys came out of the forest, babies and all to swim in the water for the bananas we were tossing to them. Very few tourists get the opportunity to visit this village so we were as much on exhibition as they were. It was a sheer delight to photograph all those beautiful faces in the Land of Smiles!

At the end of a perfect day, we were treated to a private seafood FEAST at the top of one of the stilt houses. I almost killed myself getting up to the top but it was worth the treacherous climb as there was so much fresh caught bounty set out to eat that my friend Diana and I could barely make a dent in it!

EXAMPLE OF A STILT HOUSE LIKE THE ONE WE WERE SERVED DINNER IN

THIS WOMAN WAS SIFTING THROUGH THE SAND FOR COCKLES

FRESH CAUGHT CATFISH TOSSED ONTO A BAMBOO RAFT

THE OYSTER BEDS WERE MAGNIFICENT AT LOW TIDE

ONE OF THE MONKEY FAMILIES WAITING FOR US TO FEED THEM

by SandraMiller on 04 November 2011

Why are Search Engines being slow to roll out their ‘Recipe Search’ functionality?

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 09:12:20 Z

What is recipe search?

In January 2010, the Microsoft owned search-engine Bing, announced its recipe search feature. Just over a year later in 2011 (which is like a lifetime in the world of IT), Google announced ‘Recipe View’, which is its version of the same thing. Despite being slower to the market, because it is better known; when Google released their version the food blogging community raved about it, saying that it was a really good thing and that it was going to change the way people would find recipes.

The recipe search functionality provided by both these search engines is quite similar. The premise is that if a user enters text into a search engine that could possibly be a recipe (e.g. chocolate chip muffins), the search engine should present the user with a number of recipes for that search.

The user should then be able to decide if they want to view recipes or not. If they do, they should have options to fine-tune their search results; for example are they looking for a recipe that is hot or cold, vegetarian or non-vegetarian, contains carrots or hazelnuts, etc.

Can I use it yet?

So now almost two years after Bing and around six months after Google, what has changed? Really, not a great deal – at least not from where I’m sitting in the UK. Why is this? Well there are a number of factors, primarily:

Both the Bing and Google recipe search tools are currently only available in the USA (enter ‘chocolate chip muffins’ into Bing or Google – and if you don’t get a food based context menu appear on the left hand side of the screen, then the recipe search feature hasn’t been activated for your location yet)
Many recipe websites and food blogs have not added the relevant code to their sites

Because recipe search is a relatively new technology, search engines are rolling it out slowly, starting in America. They don’t want to get it wrong (a lot of good technologies get released but get retired early due to lack of take-up – Google Wave is a good example of this).

Actually, if you are not in America right now, you can still use the Google Recipe View, you just need to visit their Recipe View landing page first.

How does the Bing and Google recipe search functionality work and what do you have to do to enable it on your website or blog?

From a search engine point of view, the difference between:

Returning results based on the text “strawberry cake”
Identifying the text entered as possibly being a recipe and then returning results for recipes that the user might be interested in

is very different. It is much harder for the search engines because they need to know the context of a web page, not just be able to pick out key words and phrases from a web page.

By context, I mean that the search engine needs to be able to identify elements of a page, such as the ingredients, steps, measurements, cooking time, preparation time, author, photograph of the recipe, etc. It can’t get this information by just reading a web page, it needs to read additional code within the web page to be able to identify each element.

A couple of years ago (as usually happens with new developments), three methods appeared to resolve this issue. They were very similar with just a few subtle (but notable) differences:

Microformats (hRecipe – note the word term ‘draft specification’ at the top of this page)
RDFa
Rich Snippets

See the bottom of the Google Rich Snippets page which lists all three and some differences between the three standards.

Also, note at the top of the Google Rich Snippets page, it says:

New! www.schema.org lets you mark up a much wider range of item types on your pages, using a vocabulary that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! can all understand.

The three initial attempts at standardising the context of data (Microformats, RDFa and Rich Snippets) were fragmented and short-lived. In June 2011, a new standard called Schema was released. This standard was agreed upon by the top three search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo). The old formats will still be supported, but the new standard is safer to use (in terms of compatibility), allows more functionality and will continue to be developed.

Although the standard is supported by the top three search engines, its take-up among the food sector has been slow. In fact I haven’t seen it being used on any other recipe website or WordPress plugin other than ours (GetMeCooking website and GetMeCooking Recipe Template for WordPress)! As described in our blog, we changed the code on the GetMeCooking website to use Schemas within a week of it coming out and our Recipe Template plugin for WordPress has always uses the Schema standard as that came out in August 2011.

Is Schema the definitive standard that we should all be using in our food sites?

This charter for the Web Schemas Task Force (owned by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)) states that the Web is too de-centralised and complex for a single schema to fully describe everything – this doesn’t give a clear direction for developers and is one of the main reasons for the slow take-up on the part of both the developers, as well as the search engines and other parties.

However, as I mentioned; the Schema standard has been agreed upon by the top three search engines, so that is a solid foundation. Another standard couldn’t emerge, but it would have some stiff competition, so this is unlikely to happen in the near future. So for now, Schema is a safe bet and is the one that all food sites and blogs should be using.

I’m sure that the standards will settle down, become more widely accepted and will evolve. I would like to see the Schema standard allow me to add Search Engine Optimised data at a more granular level. On GetMeCooking we store ingredients at a fine level – for example we record the measurement of each ingredient as a value (we are the only site I’ve seen that does this – other sites save the measurement as text). We do this so we can do clever things like:

Automate the pluralisation of measurements
Dynamically change the recipe format to imperial/metric/USA based on the visitor’s location
Dynamically change the number of servings

Note that the Schema formats apply to many uses, not just recipes. See http://schema.org/ and http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html for the types of schemas available and where and how they are used.

Summary

I know that this article is perhaps too technical to write on a recipe site, but I wanted to explain (and give evidence) why people are wrong when they say that:

Google was the first search engine to offer recipe search functionality
Recipe search is available worldwide
The hRecipe microformat should be used

In fact:

Bing was the first major search engine to have recipe search functionality (over a year before Google)
Both Bing and Google only offer recipe search in the USA right now
The Schema format should be used, not Microformats (hRecipe), RDFa or Rich Snippets

by Paul on 03 November 2011

Step 11: Meet other food bloggers

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 09:18:43 Z

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Food blogging is a very social thing and getting to know other food bloggers is part of the fun.

Here are some tips on how to get to know fellow foodies online and in person.

Meet Online

Food blogs

Use our food blog directory to find other bloggers, see what they are doing, reach out to them and say “hi” by posting on their blog. Remember to add your blog to the directory too!

Forums

There are many food forums. The best are ones that have developed a community of regular posters – often revolving on a particular topic, such as chocolate, slow cooking, dietary requirement, location, etc.

Facebook

There are lots of food related groups on Facebook that you can follow and participate in. These can be a good way to talk with other foodies on a particular subject. If you attend a food event or conference, it is quiet likely that it will have an associated Facebook group that you can participate in to get to know people before the event – and to keep up with the latest news.

You can also create a Facebook group for your blog. This works best if your blog has a very niche focus, or if your blog is very popular. You can add and remove functionality and security from Facebook groups, such as forums, pictures, the ability to allow everyone to post on the wall, apps, etc.

Twitter

Following someone on Twitter is a fantastic way to stay up-to-date with what they are doing, posting and discussing in real time. It is also a great way to interact with fellow foodies as you can reply to, or re-tweet tweets that you receive.

With Twitter, you can organise people (‘tweeps’) that you follow into lists. For example you might have lists for your friends, family, food bloggers, food photographers, food companies, restaurants, etc. You can then view a list to see all tweets by people within that list. GetMeCooking has a number of lists, comprising of people who we don’t follow in our main twitter feed – this allows us to keep track of many people on twitter, but not have too much ‘noise’ in our main feed.

You can also find people on Twitter using Twitter based directory services such as WeFolllow.

Google+

Google+ allows you to find and follow people (and soon companies) and engage with them. You can group people into ‘Circles’ to make following them easier and at the same time filter out the noise.

Video Sites

Elizabeth Filardi made a project whereby she filmed herself having breakfast every morning. It has been watched and commented on by thousands of people.

Video blogging is becoming a popular way to create and engage with people. Darya Pino hosts a ‘Summer Tomato Live’ show in which she discusses food and food related issues with her online audience.

Meet in Person

Meetups

Search on meetup for food events in your area.

Other websites and organisations have similar types of ‘meetups’.

Food Blogger Conferences

Yes it’s true – there are conferences around the world specifically for food bloggers to meet up, socialise and learn more about food blogging!

The largest in the UK is Food Blogger Connect – I attended the first one and presented at the third one! See me at 2:59 in this video:

These events usually have talks from high-profile food bloggers, people who have written food related books, people/companies who have written software that might be of interest to food bloggers, cooking demonstrations, restaurant critiques, food photography lessons, food journalists, workshops on food blogging software such as WordPress, etc.

Potluck Cooking Events

The term potluck (not spelt ‘pot luck’ or ‘pot-luck’) may have come from the word potlatch or the term ‘luck of the pot’.

A potluck cooking event is a social event where a number of people get together and they each bring a dish to share. Here is a review of a potluck cooking even that I attended in London.

This type of event is often held at someone’s house, or in a public place such as a park.

Lunch and Dinner Clubs

Doing the same thing for lunch every day while at work can get a bit boring, so why not use the time to socialise? Websites such as Grub with Us and Lets Lunch let you specify the day and time when you are free to take your lunchbreak so you can meet up with other people in your area.

Dinner clubs are similar, just usually not as rushed. They can take place at someone’s house, or at a restaurant.

Some clubs are themed. For example a Russian brunch club I attended had the theme ‘Ukraine and it’s lard(er)’, so that was a chance for me to taste authentic Ukrainian food, learn a bit about the country and meet with some food bloggers and non-food bloggers.

Other groups such as Girl Geek Dinners might also be fun (unfortunately I’m not able to attend these to review them!).

Food Festivals

Food festivals are a great way to taste a variety of foods, talk to traders and to see cooking and product demonstrations.

I can recommend the Ludlow Food Festival which is Britain’s longest running food festival.

These would make a perfect venue for a food blogger meetup.

Holidays

There are a wide variety of food based holidays available, including wine-tasting, food and photography, culinary tours of regions and cooking.

The Culinary tour of Lebanon holiday that I went on was organised by a food blogger and is often (but not exclusively) attended by other food bloggers.

Cooking Courses

Cooking courses are often attended by food bloggers. You are quite likely to bump into some food bloggers on a course, or you could start a topic on a forum to organise for yourself and other food bloggers to attend a course.

Food Writing Courses

Writing about food isn’t easy. The challenge is to keep your readers engaged and interested by not making every recipe sound the same. For example try writing three blog posts about a cheeseburger a barbeque burger and a bacon and egg burger – they are basically the same with just a few different ingredients.

Learning how to write well helps make you more creative – as well as more critical of yourself!

Food writing courses are a great way to meet other food bloggers and find out how others write about the same subject from a different angle.

Suggestions?

How have you met other foodies? Are you attending any food related social events soon? Which was your favourite? Let us know in the comments.

Coming Soon: Step 12: SEO - Get Search Engines to understand your recipes, comments and other content

by Paul on 29 October 2011

GetMeCooking Recipe Template plugin for WordPress version 1.06 is now available

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 14:29:44 Z

Today we released version 1.06 of our Recipe Template plugin for WordPress.

It is only a minor update. The significant points are:

Added support for Imperial/US measurements
Added more default measurement options
Citing a source (author, book, etc.) no longer requires a URL
Added magazine as a source

We will soon be releasing an update which will make adding recipe steps and ingredients a lot faster.

It’s amazing that we have already had over 700 downloads of our plugin, which was released less than two months ago! We now have our eyes on the 1,000 download milestone :-)

Feedback has been amazing. Bloggers with new food blogs are choosing to use it and a number of existing (high-profile) blogs have already switched to it!

Please give us feedback on what you like about the plugin and what new features you would like to see.

Plus please rate us on the WordPress Plugin Directory - much appreciated!

Happy blogging.

by Paul on 23 October 2011

Russian Brunch Club – I’ve just had my first taste of Ukrainian food

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 22:09:38 Z

I first met Katrina last year at a potluck cooking event in London. I hadn’t seen many Russian food blogs before, so she has become my de-facto Russian foodie to follow! So when I saw that she was hosting a Russian brunch club event, I signed up without hesitation (well I may have hesitated a little when I saw the photos of the ladies in flowery costumes, but I saw the men weren’t wearing them, so I wouldn’t be forced to wear one)!

This is the third Russian brunch club that Katrina was to host. Each of her events are themed around different things. This one was to be themed on Ukrainian food. I really didn’t know much about Russian food (and less so about Ukrainian), so I didn’t know what to expect. Katrina kept the menu secret until the day so I didn’t know if I would be getting vodka with caviar or vodka with cabbage (the only thing I was fairly certain of was the vodka).

Due to issue with the slow, cram-packed train from Milton Keynes to Euston (sardines have it easy!) I arrived 10 minutes late, but luckily just before things had gotten started. So I said hi to everyone, sat down and then out popped Katrina with a selection of salo.

What is salo? Well it’s pig fat. Or as Boris Berger, curator of Salo museum in Lviv, Ukraine would say:

“Salo is when noone f**ks you around and you’ve got a bit of money.”

By the way, the Salo museum is the world’s first pig fat museum!

There were mixed types of salo – light, dark and layered. Katrina explained what salo was (the fat from the back of a pig) and how the layered salo was created by feeding the pig alternate types of food as it grows. She also showed us how to eat it – by rubbing a clove of garlic on a piece of bread and then eating the bread with a slice of salo. Little did I know before the event that I would be eating pure pig fat and stinking of garlic! Then again that’s not such a bad thing because I’m a baconaholic and garlic is good for you.

We were given cold shots of vodka (which seemed to go down very nicely) and made a toast to ‘salo’. There was also some home-made red wine which had a slightly dry, sweet-cherry, oaky taste to it – very nice! 3 of the 12 guests were Ukrainian/Romanian and they told me how it was normal for their families to buy grapes back home and make wine from it (some with better results than others!). Apparently most homes did this.

Next came the Aubergine and tomato stacks. These looked fantastic and were Katrina’s mother’s speciality dish from southern Ukraine. They were a very light tasting, summer food that tasted as good as they looked.

After this came the Lyuba’s borsch, which was a soup with vegetables. It reminded me of a cross between tomato soup and oxtail soup. The lady to my right (sorry I’ve forgotten her name!) commented on how nicely I had poured the sour cream on top of my soup – for a second I felt like Kryten turning on ‘smug mode’.

The next course was a little unusual – or at least the presentation of it was… It was half a pigs head. The pig still had its teeth and had been shaven! Images of Katrina applying shaving foam and then shaving the pig entered my head – but I didn’t taste any shaving foam so it was okay. The presentation of this caused quite a stir and everyone reached for their cameras. The pig had taken 2.5 hours to cook and the meat was very nice. The skin was very thick and hard to cut through, but it was fun to watch people carve it! The crackling was very nice though, so well worth the effort. Along with the pig was buckwheat and booze. Plus there was gravy (made from the pig) which was the perfect complement to the buckwheat.

Also with the pig was Vareniki, which are dumplings, stuffed with the ‘best bits’ of an animal and mushrooms – although Katrina didn’t say what she meant by ‘best bits’… [Update from Katrina in the comments below - by 'best bits', she meant offal!]

Then there was a course of:

Trans-Carpathian Banush which is a luscious polenta-like stew of corn, home-made sourcream and shkvarki. This was the only thing of the 6 courses that I wasn’t really too fond of (just my personal taste) – having said that, I managed to eat it all! It tasted a bit like a cross between rice pudding and scrambled egg
Lviv oladushki (plump little pancakes, made with a secret ingredient)
A couple of other things that Katrina made that aren’t on the menu she gave us. Being in Ukrainian I can’t remember the names of them, but they were nice and you can see them in the photographs below

Dessert

Then there was dessert – with something that I wasn’t expecting – cheesecake! Actually there were two types of cheesecake, one with raisins and a Lviv cake which is made with fresh cheese (which she made herself) and a layer of poppy seeds.

Finally there was Vareniki, stuffed with sour cherries. These were very nice and to my surprise the cherries and sour cream were warm – very yummy!

Overall I thought…

The event was actually far more fun and educational that I thought it was going to be.

It was my first taste of Ukrainian cooking – and what better way to experience it than with a room full of fellow foodies, some of whom were Ukrainian (or from that region).

Katrina and her friend (who got roped in to be an assistant) dressed up in traditional costume and did a fantastic job of keeping everyone fed, drink levels topped up, involved, entertained and happy. I even got a slice of cheesecake to take with me for the train-ride home.

It really couldn’t have been any better. Plus for just £25 it really was amazing value. I would highly recommend it to everyone, whether you have an interest in food, want to experience Russian cuisine or just want a fun afternoon out.

View all photographs of the event.

by Paul on 19 September 2011

A review of the Ludlow Food Festival 2011 – Britain’s longest running food festival

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:56:31 Z

A couple of weeks ago my brother Kevin and I decided to head over to Ludlow for the Ludlow Food Festival. Started in 1995, it is Britain’s longest consecutively running food festival and as we hadn’t been before and it coincided with my birthday weekend, we thought it was worth a visit.

We went on the Friday (the opening day). Access to it was easy as we used the recommended park and ride scheme. At 10am on the Friday morning, with a field full of cars and the mention that there were 12 coaches running throughout the day, we could already tell that this was a very popular event! It was a short ~15 minute drive into the centre of Ludlow, then an easy walk from the coach towards the castle which was hosting the food festival.

Walking through Ludlow was interesting – it is a rather unique, small market town. I say unique because despite it being pretty much in the middle of nowhere (not near any big city and a place that I hadn’t heard of before) it has a distinguishing feature in that most of the shops in Ludlow are independently owned. There are some mobile phone shops and coffee shops (e.g. Costa), but you won’t find a Burger King, KFC or McDonalds there, nor will you find a WHSmith newsagents or any high-street fashion/retail shops. Instead you will find a number of independently owned shops, including butchers, cake shops, cafes, chocolate shop, ice-cream shop, fudge shop, craft shops, clothing shops, fishing and shooting shop, museum, etc. Plus it even has not one but two Michelin star restaurants (it is very unusual to have one, let alone two Michelin star restaurants in a small town)!

I live in Milton Keynes which is the UK’s newest town at just 40 years old. Milton Keynes was pretty much build from scratch and therefore had the most recent planning of any town/city in the UK to date. Milton Keynes has everything (including a 16 screen cinema and a 120 metre indoor ski slope), but I found myself walking around thinking that the town planner of Milton Keynes may have gotten things a little bit wrong – there is a lot they could learn from Ludlow.

Just before the castle was a market square. They have a market every week so I don’t know how much of it (if any) was changed for the Food Festival, but it was quite large and nice to walk around. There were a few food stalls, including a stall with baked goods, run by a Frenchman. Upon seeing the cakes on this stall (rather the size of the cakes on the stall!) Kevin insisted that we sample them – this was to be the theme of the day – i.e. an ‘eyes before belly’ approach to seeing and eating! By the end of the day we would find ourselves rather full!

After walking around the market, we sat outside the castle entrance to eat our cakes (yum!). Then we picked up our wrist-bands (entry passes) and entered the castle through its front entrance. This was all well organised so was quick and easy – it had helped that we had pre-booked the tickets.

The festival was set within the castle grounds – what a nice setting! It was a large event, but easy to walk round. Most of the trade stalls were under-cover in large marquees but there was also plenty to see in the open air.

One of the first things we did was to seek out free samples to nibble on (well that’s half the fun of going to food events isn’t it!). We found stall selling cheese (and more importantly – they were giving free samples). A girl of around 10 years old approached me and offered me a variety of cheeses to choose from. Her mother stood behind her with a big grin on her face, very proud of her daughter who was telling me about each of the cheeses (and she seemed quite knowledgeable) – it was good to see. In addition, the cheeses did taste very good! I remember one of them was so smooth it was almost like butter.

We proceeded to look at (and sample) a number of other stalls before arriving at one of the two presentation areas where chefs would give talks and cooking demonstrations throughout the weekend. Here they talked about cooking eels, which was interesting. They had a video camera and 2 televisions, so you could see what they were doing close-up.

One ‘exhibit’ I found interesting was a hive of bees placed between glass, so you can see the bees at work. There was someone there who told us a bit about bees and pointed out the queen bee to us (they had previously marked it with a dab of blue paint). I put my ear near the glass and could hear the bees buzzing – loudly!

Inside the marquees were stalls from over 130 top quality, small independent food and drink producers – many of them local to Ludlow or the Marches (the England-Wales border country). The main items on sale were cheeses, meats, poultry, game, pies, sausages, sausage rolls, cakes, beers and ciders.

Throughout the day we had more cakes than we should have had, plus some delicious sausage rolls with a cheese and herb flavouring (look how much sausage meat there was in these!):

Blue banana ice-cream (which was very nice and the owner was obviously very proud of his product as he proceeded to tell me how he made this unusual ice-cream):

As well as the food, we were also able to look around the castle. It’s quite small and there isn’t much to see, but it does have a tall tower which offer some fantastic views of the area. Warning, don’t go up the tower if you are afraid of heights – we saw a couple of people freeze half-way up the stairwell!

We spent most of the day wondering between the food festival, the market and the town. By around 4pm most the festival was very quiet, which was nice as there were no crowds of people – if you want to take photographs of stalls and wiz round everywhere quickly, this is the best time of day to do it!

On the Saturday, purely on a recommendation from Camilla from Bart Spices, we visited the Ludlow Food Centre, which is only 5 minutes North of the Ludlow town centre - and it is definitely worth a visit! It is like a mini-supermarket, but full of high-quality produce, ingredients, fish, vegetables, meat, bread, cakes, chocolate, ice-cream, etc. from local suppliers and producers. If I lived near it, I would definitely make it my primary place for food shopping.

Also on the Saturday we went to the town of Ironbridge and then the RAF museum at Cosford (very good if you are into planes).

Then on Sunday we came home because it rained… But we ended up going to the new Jamie’s Italian restaurant in Milton Keynes, which was very nice. What impressed me about it (as much as the food) was the knowledge that the waitresses had about the food. They had obviously been taught about each dish and they offered an explanation of everything while ordering and while serving – this makes a big difference (if you are reading this and you own a restaurant/café/bar – take note!)

So overall, we had a really good, relaxing foodie weekend and I would certainly recommend the Ludlow Food Festival to anyone. They also have the Ludlow Spring Festival in May!

You can find more photos of the Ludlow Food Festival here.

by Paul on 19 September 2011

Want us to showcase your WordPress themes?

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:38:27 Z

Are you a WordPress designer with themes that are suitable for displaying recipes?

If you are, talk to us because we want to create a showcase of themes that work with our Recipe Template plugin.

If we like your themes and if we can ensure that they work with our plugin (most do!) then we will be happy to promote them.

Not a designer, but know some great themes?

Let us know which themes you like. We'll check them out and will tell others about them too!

The future...

Going forward, we would like to get designers and bloggers talking together, to create a set of high-quality themes that are proven to work great with our plugin!

by Paul on 13 September 2011

Around the world in 80 days? We've beaten that!

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 21:21:53 Z

We've gone global!

Our Recipe Template plugin for WordPress has only been out for 6 days and already we have had reports of it being installed in:

Australia
England
France
Germany
Holland
Lebanon
Spain
USA (several states)

Let me restate that first one again - Australia! That's exciting for us because we are based in England, so that's the other side of the world!!!

Have you installed it? Where are you from? Let us know in the comments below!

Changes

As you can see, we are already up to version 1.05. The changelog doesn't list everything we are doing (else it would be too long), only the major things; but you can see that we are keeping busy!

Resolving Bugs

We use a combination of automated and manual testing processes to test the plugin on 2 PC's and a Mac. Plus we have tested on over 25 WordPress themes. This is pretty good, but we can't test every configuration. So there are inevitably some configurations that cause issues. But in most cases, when someone has reported an issue, we have been able to fix it within a day.

New Features - Already!

Some features that have already been added due to feedback include:

Hiding the recipe title if the recipe title is the same as the blog post title
Recipe notes
Reference the source of the recipe (author/book/website)

Thanks

The take-up has been amazing! Thanks to everyone who has tried it so far and thanks for the bug reports, feature suggestions and positive feedback - we really appreciate it.

by Paul on 06 September 2011

Recipe Template plugin for WordPress – now available!

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 15:23:35 Z

After announcing it in a recent blog post – and demonstrating it live at Europe’s largest food blogging event, we released our Recipe Template plugin for WordPress for general availability 3 days ago.

Feedback so far has been really amazing! Some bloggers have very engaged with us (we have been exchanging several e-mails) to report some minor bugs, request new features and to tell us what they like about it. This engagement is great for us because it helps us build a product that food bloggers really want, not just what we think they want.

So far it seems that we have been doing a great job! No time to rest though as we have hundreds of ideas we want to implement -and somehow as we do more, the list keeps getting longer!

Based on your initial feedback, we will be releasing an update soon, which will include some minor bug fixes as well as add some new features. When the update is released, it will show up in in your WordPress Dashboard, where you can perform an automatic update. When you do this, you won’t lose any custom settings.

If you haven’t seen the plugin yet, you can find out more about it here.

Happy blogging!

by Paul on 03 September 2011

Out and about this September

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 23:38:23 Z

September will be a busy month for us

8th = Paul's birthday :-)
9th - 11th September = Ludlow Food Festival, Ludlow, England. Will feature more than 130 top quality small independent food and drink producers from the Marches, the England-Wales border country, inside Ludlow Castle
18th September = Ukraine and it's lard(er) brunch club, London, England. Ukrainian drinks, 6 courses food, stories and music Hosted by Katrina of The Gastronimical Me
26th September - 9th October = Holiday, Nice, France. Well if you're going to go on holiday - you might as well go somewhere with some of the best food in the world!

What events are we missing? Let us know!

by Paul on 03 September 2011

Food Blogger Connect 2011 - presenting is fun!

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:15:49 Z

A couple of weeks ago, on the 14th August, I attended and gave a presentation at the Food Blogger Connect 2011 conference in London.

It was held at The Hempel hotel in the very prestigious area of Bayswater, London. It's a 5 star hotel and was used in the final scene in the film Notting Hill!

I was really excited to present because it was the first opportunity that I had had to demonstrate the Recipe Template plugin for WordPress that we have been developing for the past 4 months - and I was very keen to see what people would think of it. After a few technical difficulties with the hotel network I gave a quick demonstration of the plugin and how it would benefit food bloggers.

During the presentation, I was very happy (and relieved!) to get a questions from the audience. Unfortunately, due to the technical issues and lunch being served, my demo was a bit shorter than planned - but that was okay as I had been able to give everyone a sneak peak at the plugin.

Straight after the presentation (despite lunch being ready!), I was approached by some keen food bloggers who were eager to ask me lots of questions, suggest new ideas and offered to help test the plugin before it is made public! This was brilliant - and just what I wanted from the presentation!

During the lunch break, between sessions and after the event, I was able to talk to many bloggers. Talking to and getting ideas and support from other food bloggers is a key part of the conference experience - you can't help but make new friends after every event such as this!

Many thanks to those of you who have offered advice and tested the plugin for us. With your help, we have been able to test the plugin on more than one test environment and you have given us valuable feedback, including suggestions for features that will be released in the first version of the plugin and some features that we will add in future versions.

Also on the day, I enjoyed watching the other presentations, in particular the one by Jaden Hair (Steamy Kitchen) in which she spoke openly and honestly about her career as a foodie and the live cooking demonstration by Caroline MiLi Artiss (Caroline MiLi Artiss).

Here is a roundup of a list of reviews of the event from some of the bloggers who attended.

For related comments made on twitter, see hashtag #FBC11.

Here are some of the photographs I took during the raffle.

Food Blogger Connect 2011

by Paul on 25 August 2011

Step 10: Site design (content is king, design is queen)

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:16:28 Z

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 1: Blogging overview
Step 2: Choose a blogging platform
Step 3: Choose a hosting provider
Step 4: Buy a domain name
Step 5: Promote yourself (and your food blog)
Step 6: Monitor your blog content
Step 7: Set up social sharing (Internet word of mouth)
Step 8: Get people to follow your obsession with food
Step 9: Branding - start with a logo
Step 10: Site design (content is king, design is queen)
Step 11: Meet other food bloggers

On your food blog it is important to remember that 'content is king and design is queen'. This means that users will only be attracted to your food blog if there is good quality content on it, they will only stick around if the content is easy to find and the design is good.

Brand Recognition

Users should be able to recognise the site that they are on and it should stand out from other sites in terms of being instantly recognisable. A good brand design will stick in someone’s mind, as well as make it easy for them to ‘pick up from where they left off’ when they next return to the blog.

The brand design includes the language used, tone of voice, fonts (headings and body text), colours, footer, menu, side-bars, page layout, etc.

Consistency

The blog should provide a consistent look and feel throughout the whole site. This ensures that the user finds it easy to read and navigate around the site.

Usability

In terms of usability, your blog needs to suitable for its target audience.

If your blog has a wide audience, it should be very easy to use and its information should be displayed very clearly. If your blog is targeted for a technical audience, or an audience that knows the subject very well; your blog could have a more ‘busy’ screen, containing more information.

The information on the blog should also be relevant to the target audience. If your visitors are from different countries, they might be used to seeing measurements in different values e.g. 100g butter (metric) or 4oz butter (imperial).

Readability

A blogs visual design should not be at the expense of making the content hard to read. The colour of text should not be similar to the colour the background it is positioned on. Nor should the background be an image or a gradient colour. Contrast Rebelian gives some good information and examples of these issues.

Text should also be large enough to read. If you’re unsure if yours is okay, find an old person who wears glasses, sit them in a dimly lit room, in front of a computer with a high resolution video display and ask them to read your website. If they have to squint or move their head close to the monitor, you probably need to make the text a bit bigger!

Colours

Colour is an important part of the design. Colour can give your site a sense of mood, seriousness, playfulness, fun, boldness or even intrigue. It also effects the readability, brand, familiarity, consistency and navigation.

The colours on your blog should complement each other – they should not be in conflict, appear garish or ‘shout’.

A site should have 3-4 colours and these should be used in a consistent manner. e.g. title, headings, header, footer, background.

Some great websites to help you with colour inspiration and decisions are:

As well as designing a blog for viewing on a computer, you should also think about how it will look when printed. By default, most web browsers do not print backgrounds.

Clear Layout

Visitors will spend more time on a site that is easy to read and navigate around than one that isn’t.

When people buy a magazine, they have invested time and money in purchasing the magazine, so they generally take time out to read it from cover to cover (or at least they look at every page to see if there is something worth reading). Blogs are not like this – users will not visit every page on your blog, nor will they scroll to the bottom of every page they find on it.

Users want to find information quickly and easily by skimming the pages for content. This is why the layout has to be clear with titles, headings, sub-headings, paragraphs, images, navigation, featured content (e.g. links to social media) and adverts all clearly laid out.

Navigation

Navigation should be clear and simple. If menu items are hidden, the user might not find them.

Mouse-over

Touch screen devices (such as the iPad) bring a new element to design. With a PC you can provide a mouse-over menu or display when a user hovers over a menu or an image with their mouse – but with an iPad, you can’t mouse-over items, you can only click or long-click (equivalent of a right mouse click).

Positioning of Features

On your blog you might want to add a number of features including:

Associated links (to RSS feed, other blogs, food websites, events, etc.)
Links to your social networks (e.g. Facebook, Google+, Twitter)
Newsletter sign-up form
Twitter feed
etc.

These should be placed in a fixed place on your blog, ensuring a consistent look and feel. They should also be placed somewhere where they will be easy for the user to find, but not obtrusive as to make the site hard to read or navigate around.

Calls to Action

Each page of your blog should have a primary purpose, as well as at most 3-4 primary ‘calls to action’.

A call to action is an action that you want the visitor to perform from the current page. Examples of these are:

Add a comment
Print the recipe
Share the blog post/recipe (via social networks or e-mail)
View the next/previous blog post

Process Flows

Process flows are defined actions that a visitor needs to complete in order to carry out a task. For example, to add a comment the process could be:

Authenticate with a social network (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and then post a comment
Authenticate with another service (e.g. Disqus) and then post a comment

Enter free text for the e-mail and URL (not verified) and then post a comment

Funnelling

Funnelling is the process in which you drive visitors through a set route. For example if you have an online shop, you want users to:

View your products – online shop
Select a product – product page
Add a product to the shopping basket – order page
Add payment information (credit card, PayPal, etc.) – payment details page
Add personal information (name, e-mail address, telephone number, address, etc.) – address page
Confirm details before placing the order– confirmation page
Review the order – order review page

Monetising

If you plan to add adverts to your food blog, you need to decide where to place the adverts.

Some common places are:

Top banner – this gets attention, but can be distracting for the user as they may confuse it with the blog heading or navigation
Right hand side of the page – this is a good place as the readers’ eye will usually read content on the left hand side of the page first, followed by the right hand side of the page. This means that the adverts will not be too obtrusive
Above the first paragraph – this is an okay position, as long as it isn’t too obtrusive. The visitor should be able to clearly see that it is an advert and they must also be able to clearly see where the content that they want starts
Below the 2^nd/3^rd paragraph – this is a good place because the visitor is already engaged with your blog content and will be somewhat committed to skipping past the advert an continuing with the rest of the content
Bottom of the page – not a good place in terms of visibility as most visitors will not read to the bottom of the page
Footer – not a good place in terms of visibility as most visitors will not read to the bottom of the page. Plus the advert needs to be clear, so that the visitor does not confuse it with the footer content or navigation

Be Clear of Distraction

A recurring statement that I have mentioned is that your design should complement the content, not hide it or fight with it. In other words, it should be not be distracting. This means that these should not be used (unless relevant):

Animated images
Rollover images (as sometimes seen on adverts)
Video
Audio

Getting a Site Design

As with the logo, you can approach a design company or ‘design marketplace’ for a blog design. Again, Sortfolio is a good starting point to find design agency and 99designs may also be worth a try as you can get your money back if you don’t like any of the designs being offered.

There are also a lot of websites that sell ‘off the shelf’ designs for blogs. These designs usually come with a few different colour schemes.

When writing a design brief, or buying a design ‘off the shelf’, ensure that the design will have the ‘space’ for the features you want. Some WordPress themes for example are designed to have spaces for 2-3 plugins (e.g. twitter feed, news feed, etc.).

Some places to get WordPress site designs:

Summary

Get creative and be innovative – but remember that design should enhance (not compromise) readability.

Step 11: Meet other food bloggers

by Paul on 03 August 2011

I’m speaking at Food Blogger Connect 2011!

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 14:10:06 Z

I’m very excited to announce 2 things today.

Firstly:

We have been quietly working on a WordPress plugin to make Food Blogger's lives easier, bring more traffic to their blog and best of all, be beneficial to people who visit their blog.

We recognise that there are thousands of great food blogs out there, but few have recipes that are well formatted, coded for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and have features that make it easy for visitors to read. Our plugin is really easy to use and doesn’t require any technical knowledge.

We will be releasing more information on it within the next few weeks.

Secondly:

I am going to be speaking at the Food Blogger Connect conference in London on Sunday 14th August!

I will discuss the problems facing food bloggers (ease of use, getting recipes noticed by search engines, how recipe functionality can be enhanced, link building, etc.) and how our WordPress plugin aims to combat all these issues - with no technical knowledge required by the blogger.

I will give a live demo of the plugin, including the full end-to-end process of writing and publishing a blog post, containing a recipe. Plus I will have a Q&A session at the end.

I will also stick around so that people can talk to me after the presentation.

The conference will be a great place for me to get first impressions of the plugin from the other participants, plus I will be able to get feedback, feature requests, etc.

I hope to see you there!

P.S. If you haven’t got a ticket yet, Olives from Spain are giving away 4 full weekend passes to the conference (12th – 14th August). See the Food Blogger Connect website for competition details.

by Paul on 02 August 2011

New site features

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:00:15 Z

We have just put live a lot of site changes throughout the site (mostly additions).

Home page (revised)

The home page now shows a summary of recent changes to the site, including the most recently added recipes, articles and blog posts.

User profile pages (improved)

In the ‘Blog Info’ tab, you can now upload your food blog’s logo.

The tabbed pages have been re-coded so that they are now pages. This means that they now have their own URL (making it easier to link to).

Private recipes (new)

We know that many cooks have their own secret recipe that they will only share with their family. Or sometimes cooks want to work on a recipe, to fine-tune it before it is ready to be shared.

For these reasons, we have added functionality to allow you to add recipes as a private recipe. To do this, simply add a recipe as normal and select the ‘Make private’ option at the top of the page.

Private recipes:

Will appear in your recipe box
Do not require a photograph
Can be made public later (will require a photograph)

Footer (revised)

We have revised the footer section to add more content and to organise it into categories.

Primary pages are in white and in bold. Secondary pages are in blue

FAQ page (new)

This is a FAQ and help page, which explains all the pages and features of the site.

Recipe box (improved)

Improved functionality.

Follow us (new)

This details the ways in which you can engage with and subscribe to content on GetMeCooking and our associated social media websites.

Subscriptions page (new)

Details the user accounts available on GetMeCooking.

Promote Us page (new)

A promotional page for GetMeCooking.

We currently have some GetMeCooking logos on there (which you can put on your website to promote us – we would be very grateful!).

We are working on a personal badge that you can add to your website. This will link to your user profile on GetMeCooking.

Food Blog Directory (new)

We want to support food bloggers, so if you have a food blog, you can list it here.

Visitors can then view the Food Blog Directory for a list of food blogs.

Jobs at GetMeCooking page (new)

On our jobs page, we will post if we are looking for any contractors/agencies.

Advertise with us (new)

For you are interested in advertising with us. This page details what we can offer you and what we would like in return.

Other general site improvements!

Including:

Performance
User interface
Image uploads can now run in parallel and have progress bars

Newsletter (new)

If you are signed up to our newsletter, you should have received our first newsletter on 6^th July 2011.

For e-mails, we use the mailChimp service, which is a safe, secure service which some of our users will already be familiar with (via other site subscriptions). It has an unsubscribe feature which makes it really easy to unsubscribe to our e-mails.

From our point of view it is also great because it provides us with analytics, including how many e-mails have been opened, which links were clicked on, etc.

Feedback?

As always, we love to hear what you think of the site. Is there anything you think we need to improve or add?

by Paul on 27 July 2011

Step 9: Branding – start with a logo

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 07:40:55 Z

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 9: Branding – start with a logo

In order to create a strong, instantly recognisable brand, you need a good logo.

The logo should come before the site design, because the colours, theme, font and ‘feel’ of the site design should be derived (or at least associated) with the logo.

To get a logo, you can use a ‘design agency’, or a ‘design marketplace’.

A design agency is a single company with one or more designers.

Sortfolio is a good starting point to find design agencies (you can sort by location and budget)

A design marketplace is somewhere where you can describe your requirements to a large number of designers. The designers (often individuals) then offer proposals that you can choose from.

99designs is a popular design marketplace

Design Agency

Depending on your budget and requirements, a design agency may be your first reference point when it comes to getting a logo. However, note that prices can vary enormously so it is a good idea to get quotes from lots of companies before you choose one.

The design agency will ask you a number of questions, to help ascertain your requirement, then likely only offer you 3 draft designs. You will then pick which of the 3 designs you prefer, then they will enhance it.

When working with a design agency, you can do it remotely (they will be used to this); meaning that you won’t have to visit them in person – all communication can be done over e-mail and phone/skype.

Design Marketplace

We used 99designs to get a logo at a very reasonable cost. After setting a good design brief (this is important), we received over 711 design concepts from 264 designers. The main incentive to try them was that they offer a full money-back guarantee if you don’t like any of the designs. If you do use 99designs , consider paying $5 above the recommended price (as we did) to ‘game the system’ – this resulted us in getting far more views and entries from developers compared to people who paid the standard price.

Some design considerations that you need to think about when having a logo designed

Ask the designers about each of these points:

It needs to convey the message of what your brand is about
It should set the tone of your brand
It needs to work on your blog (usually in the header)
It may need to work on a light and/or dark background
It must be clear and easy to read when printed in colour, greyscale and black and white
It must work in different sizes
It must work on other sites such as Facebook and Twitter – some of which require a landscape format and some require a square format
You should have guidelines on where and how the logo will be used, the about of white space surrounding it, etc.
You might want to think about spot colour and process colour printing considerations
For brand familiarity, your blog’s favicon should be representative of the logo (the favicon is the image that appears in the tab and bookmark of the web browser). It does not have to be the logo itself, for example Facebook use an ‘f’ and Twitter uses an image of a bird

You can see our logo (and variations of it) on our promote page.

Step 10: Site design (content is king, design is queen)

by Paul on 25 July 2011

Step 8: Get people to follow your obsession with food

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:48:48 Z

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 1: Blogging overview
Step 2: Choose a blogging platform
Step 3: Choose a hosting provider
Step 4: Buy a domain name
Step 5: Promote yourself (and your food blog)
Step 6: Monitor your blog content
Step 7: Set up social sharing (Internet word of mouth)
Step 8: Get people to follow your obsession with food
Step 9: Branding - start with a logo
Step 10: Site design (content is king, design is queen)
Step 11: Meet other food bloggers

Step 8: Get people to follow your obsession with food

As well as allowing visitors on your site to actively share your content, you need to be able to allow them to effortlessly subscribe to your content.

Methods for subscription include:

E-mail

E-mail is deemed by most experts as being the best way to engage with users. This is because people are used to monitoring and managing their e-mail inbox on a regular basis. When someone receives an e-mail, they will do one or more of the following:

Read the subject
Read the subject and then delete/ignore the e-mail
Read the subject and the message
Read the subject and the message – and click on links which will direct them onto the blog

It is unlikely that most people will ignore the subject and at least have a quick peek at the message.

Mailing Lists

You might want to set up one or more mailing lists for your blog. For example:

Any new content
General Newsletters and Blog Updates
Event information

Managing e-mail lists can get complicated if doing it manually via Outlook, Google Mail, etc.

MailChimp is a really good solution that allows you to:

Create multiple mailing lists
Create and manage campaigns
Send e-mails in HTML and plain text formats
Integrate functionality with your blog, facebook, twitter and RSS.

Plus it gives you a whole host of analytical information, including:

Which of the members on your mailing list has opened the e-mail and which haven’t
It rates each of your members based on their history, so you can see how interested/involved each member is with your content
Which countries the members are from
If the members have opened links from within the e-mails
If the members have shared the e-mails and links

MailChimp gives you all this functionality – and it is free for up to 2,000 e-mails per month.

Facebook

Facebook is at present the largest social media platform, so it may be a good place for you to attract, engage and collaborate with your audience in a way that may be less restrictive than on your blog.

You can set up a Facebook group in minutes and it won’t be made live (published) straight away, so you can customise the look and features of the group before you make it live, or you can simply register the name without ever making it live.

Google+ (Google Plus)

Google+ is Google's social networking service. One of the main advantages of Google+ is that you can follow individual people without having to be ‘friends’ with them. This makes it a lot more open and easier to share data (while still having privacy – in the form of social ‘circles’ in place).

You can set up an account as an individual and/or as a business. If you are a food blogger it is advisable to register a Google+ account in your blog name, at least to reserve it, but also to actively use it as a point of engagement with people on there.

Twitter

Twitter is a great micro-blogging tool for ‘tweeting’ out short (140 character) messages to individuals, or as a broadcast to all your followers.

You can promote twitter on your blog to attract people to follow you. You can also join Twitter directories such as WeFollow.

People can then choose to follow you (subscribe to your twitter feed) and optionally add you to a list. For example, our visitors might add the GetMeCooking twitter account to a list called ‘Recipes’. Lists are useful as it allows people to quickly catch up or focus their attention on a specific group of people/companies/events.

We have created a number of lists for the GetMeCooking twitter account, including ‘Food-bloggers’, ‘Food-Events-and-shows’ and ‘Food-photography’. These lists are available for everyone to see.

RSS

What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a tool that allows people to have new content from multiple websites delivered into a central location, making it quick and easy to read.

With RSS you can monitor your favourite websites, so that when they produce new content, the new pages will appear in your RSS reader (similar to receiving an e-mail). Then, from within your RSS reader, you can skim through the content from each website and then selectively view what you want.

The content will be displayed either in part or in full within your RSS reader (depending on how each website has chosen to present it). At any time, you can decide to read the content within your RSS reader, or click on a link which will take you to that page on the website.

Benefits of using RSS to consume content:

View all of your favourite websites in 1 place
Easy to search the content of many websites for specific words/phrases
No need to visit many websites to look for new content – all new content comes to you!
Get content in your RSS reader as soon as it is on the website – so you know about it sooner than if you were to check the website twice a day/week
Easy to skim through content and then optionally click through to the website
It is free
There are RSS readers for most types of computers, mobile phones and World Wide Web
RSS readers can be configured to download the RSS feeds on a regular basis (e.g. every 30 mins, hour, day) so you can read the websites even when you do not have an Internet connection

Screenshot of Google Reader:

What does this mean for content producers?

You should be using producing RSS on your blog, to support your visitors who want to use RSS.

The good news is that it is usually very easy to be set up and can be done for free. In fact, if you are using blogging software (such as Blogger, Tumblr or WordPress) you probably already have RSS automatically set up and in use!

Generating RSS feeds can increase your readership because they remove the need for your visitors to remember to visit your site on a daily/weekly basis – instead, your new content will automatically appear in their RSS reader. It also means that you may get faster feedback from those users – which in turn means more instant (often higher-quality) feedback for your blog.

Many RSS readers make it easy to share content over social networks (it is often easier to share it this way than by clicking on a link within the website). So if a visitor sees something they like, they might be more willing to share it; which in turn gives your content a wider audience – and some of that extended audience might like it and share it to their friends…

I produce content – what should I do?

On your blog, you should:

Configure – set up one or many RSS feeds (you could have a global feed which contains everything plus/or individual feeds for certain topics e.g. baking, soups, recipe of the day)
Promote – promote your RSS feeds. Let people know you have them and encourage people to use them
Measure – monitor the number of people who subscribe to your RSS feeds. Which of your feeds get the most subscribers?
Monetise – yes (depending on how you define your RSS feed) you can add adverts to your RSS feeds!

When promoting your RSS feeds, best practices are:

If you have multiple RSS feeds, have a page on your site that and explains what each one is for lists each of the RSS feeds
Promote them on your website and in e-mails
Make use of the standard RSS logo (or a variation of it). This will be instantly recognisable to visitors

Examples of RSS icons:

Standard:

Custom:

Step 7: Set up social sharing (Internet word of mouth)

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 23:08:25 Z

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 1: Blogging overview
Step 2: Choose a blogging platform
Step 3: Choose a hosting provider
Step 4: Buy a domain name
Step 5: Promote yourself (and your food blog)
Step 6: Monitor your blog content
Step 7: Set up social sharing (Internet word of mouth)
Step 8: Get people to follow your obsession with food
Step 9: Branding - start with a logo
Step 10: Site design (content is king, design is queen)
Step 11: Meet other food bloggers

Step 7: Set up social sharing (Internet word of mouth)

As Gary Vaynerchuck says in his book ‘Crush It’ (which is well worth reading by the way), word of mouth is the most powerful selling tool there is. On the Internet, word of mouth can spread further and faster and in more languages than conventional media can – and it can do it at zero cost.

To aid word of mouth, you should make it very quick and easy for visitors of your blog to share your content with others, whether it is with their friends, family or social networks.

Sharing via a Button

Buttons can be added to a blog to allow users to quickly and easily share the page (or content within the page) with other people, or broadcast it to their followers in a chosen social service.

Some of the most popular methods sharing content are:

E-mail
Facebook
Twitter
Print

E-mail

Everyone (almost everyone!) has an e-mail account, so there should always be an option to share using this medium.

Also, e-mail distribution lists are perhaps the best way to engage with visitors on a regular basis, as e-mails are more likely to be read than Facebook messages, tweets and RSS. Therefore, if you set up an e-mail sharing option, you should include within the e-mail that gets sent, a link to a sign-up page for your blog’s e-mail distribution list.

Facebook

Facebook can have multiple states for sharing:

Facebook ‘like’

When a visitor on your blog clicks ‘like’:

A message is posted on their Facebook wall (which all their friends can see) to say that they like your page
The visitor will be prompted to (optionally) post an additional message about the page/site on their Facebook wall

Facebook 'send'

When a visitor on your blog clicls 'send', they will get the options to send the page URL as:

A message to their Facebook friends
A message to a group wall of a group that they are a member of
An e-mail to any e-mail address

The message will include a link to the page URL, along with the title, image and short description of the link.

Twitter

Twitter is great for sharing links. From a website they can be sent in 2 formats:

Tweets

Tweets – The 140 character message will contain someone’s Twitter username, plus a URL (usually shortened) to the blog post.

The message will then be sent to that person, but will be viewable by anyone on the Internet (assuming the user account is not private).

Retweets

Retweets will be in the format: RT @<blog_twitter_address> <message>

This will ‘broadcast’ the tweet to all of the followers of the person tweeting. It will not be aimed at an individual. It will also be publicly viewable by anyone on the Internet (assuming the user account is not private).

Google +1

When a user selects the Google +1 button, the content doesn’t get sent to a particular person, instead it gets highlighted in their Google+ profile, plus it ‘adds weight’ to it in search engine social rankings (see below for details).

Google +1’s also get saved to your Google account and you can share them, so they are viewable by everyone, or keep them private.

Print

The good old-fashioned method of printing something out and handing it to people shouldn’t be discounted. Especially with regards to recipes (which often get printed for use in the kitchen anyway).

The print format should differ from your screen format. That is, it should not include any menus, unnecessary images or other items that shouldn’t appear in paper format.

Search Engine Social Rankings

Large search engines such as Bing and Google now let you link your account with social accounts (e.g. sites such as Facebook and Twitter). The search engines then know who your friends are and give you personalised search results which are ‘weighted/influenced’ by what you friends have shared or ‘liked’ via those accounts. They also know that word of mouth (or friend recommendations) is the best recommendation that you can get!

Creating the Sharing Functionality

Creating the functionality that I have discussed is quite easy. Your blogging platform might have the functionality built in, or might have plug-ins available.

You can look at these links for more information:

AddThis – a good resource for virtually any method of sharing (including Facebook and Twitter). It also monitors the statistics so you can see which social media streams are working best for you
Facebook – guides and code samples for adding Facebook to your blog (including 'like' and 'send')
Google +1 – lets you create a customised Google +1 button
Twitter – explains how to add the Tweet Button to your blog

Your blog

You need to identify how you can help your visitors share data on your blog, making it easy for them to do, while bringing maximum value to the promotion of your blog.

Step 8: Get people to follow your obsession with food

by Paul on 12 July 2011

We are now using schemas - for improved SEO

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 09:20:16 Z

As described in my previous blog post, a year ago with Bing and just a few months ago with Google, microformats were being promoted as being the best way to give the information on your website description, structure and relevancy.

The problem was that there were some differences in the data that would be read by these search engines (and others that used microformats - and similar technologies).

So recently, the top search engines have come together and agreed on a standard of schemas, which are defined on schema.org.

We have gone through our site and re-coded the relevant sections, replacing the 'old' microformat code with the new schemas.

The advantage of us doing this means that all of our content (recipes, articles, user profiles, etc.) will be correctly read and 'understood' by all the main search engines.

by Paul on 09 July 2011

Step 6: Monitor your blog traffic

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 11:18:03 Z

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 6: Monitor your blog traffic

Monitoring your traffic to see who visits your blog, how they found it and what they do when they are there is vital if you want to understand and attract more visitors.

Some metrics (measures) that you might want to track include:

Number of unique visits per day
Total number of page views per day
Physical location of users
The times and days your blog gets the most traffic
User retention – the number of people that return to your site vs the number of new visitors
Most viewed pages – see which of your pages get the most visits (and which get the least)
Average number of pages viewed per visit
Average time spent on the blog per visit
Keywords used to find your website
Top sources for visits to your website – including search engines, referrals from other websites, social media (e.g. twitter or facebook), direct access, e-mail and RSS
Funnels – you can define funnels to identify how many visitors complete a series of steps (e.g. view an item, add it to a shopping cart and purchase it)
Devices – see what percentage of users access your blog via a mobile phone, tablet, laptop or PC
The most popular web browsers that visitors are using
The most popular screen resolutions that visitors are using

This can all seem quite daunting, but luckily all of this information can be easily captured and presented in easy to read formats. Your blogging platform might come with analytics tools built in. If not (or if you want a more powerful solution), we recommend Google Analytics and Woopra – both are free and very easy to set up within most blogging platforms.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics tracks all the data you will ever need, plus it integrates with other products such as Google AdSense and Google AdWords, which means that you get all of your information in one place. It does not report data in real-time, but this isn’t really an issue for most people.

For a quick overview of what Google Analytics is and how it can help you understand your users (and in turn get more visitors to your blog), watch the Google Analytics Product Tour.

Woopra

Woopra is similar to Google Analytics, but its main ‘selling point’ is that it tracks and reporst data in real time. This means that you can watch your users move around your site in real time - this may be useful if you have a live event (such as a conference or live podcast) and you want to see how people interact with your blog while the live event is in progress.

Another unique feature is that you can select a user and prompt a chat conversation with them (a pop-up will appear within their web browser).

The downside to Woopra does not provide as much information as Google Analytics (although it is still excellent) and it does not integrate with Google Google AdSense or Google AdWords. But if you do want to know what is happening on your website RIGHT NOW, then it is a great tool.

Look at the Woopra Features Overview page for more information on all it has to offer.

Best of both

You can of course use both Google Analytics and Woopra on your blog at the same time.

On GetMeCooking we did use both, but have removed Woopra as we found that it gave a small performance hit as it constantly sends data back from the website to the Woopra servers – and we are speed freaks. Google Analytics does not provide constant communication to the Google servers and is therefore less of a performance hit. Also, although real-time data is nice to have; in most cases it isn’t really that useful.

Getting the tools

To get up and running with Google Analytics or Woopra you will first need to sign up to those services and then import the relevant plugin into your blog. This should be very easy and will be documented on the help pages of the blogging platform that you use.

You can also monitor this information when on the move, using apps from your mobile phone (there are Google Analytics apps and Woopra apps for most smart phones).

Step 7: Set up social sharing (Internet word of mouth)

by Paul on 02 July 2011

Trying different quality brands

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:10:34 Z

Go to any supermarket and you will be confronted with different brands for the same product, they break down into:

Supermarket own brand (low quality range)
Supermarket own brand (standard quality range)
Supermarket own brand (high quality range)
External brand offering the same three ranges

You will fall into one of these categories for when doing your weekly shop. When was the last time you tried one of the cheaper and one of the more expensive products? Don't let the packaging fool you, those fancy looking external brand boxes can be the same source of ingredients that goes into the medium quality range of the supermarkets own brand, the only difference is less appealing packaging.

You can't just try changing one of your items either, you will find some cheaper items should not be bought but other items taste the same. I would say keep buying the more expensive meat products and free-range eggs for taste and welfare reasons but for your items such as cereal, pasta or rice try the own-brand varieties.

Experiment buying lowest quality

I had a conversation at work about how great I think Lindt chocolate is and the counter argument was that chocolate 6 times cheaper was also nice. Well, after a side by side taste comparison they all changed their minds!

When it comes to other items such as pasta, I assume the more expensive pasta is better but I can't taste a difference.

Experiment buying standard

I tend to buy the high quality range items so as an experiment I bought some medium quality onion rings. Calculating per 100g the high quality range costs three times as much and I soon realised why.

The "premium range" onion rings were crunchier with a more subtle onion taste. The standard onion rings were too overpowering and a bit squishy (I didn't want to eat the rest of the pack).

Then there was the time I tried own brand fries. They were skinny and went black on the end and remained undercooked in the middle! This particular supermarket had bad fries but perhaps one of the other supermarkets own brand fries are better which gets back to my other point about trying other supermarkets.

Experiment buying highest quality

I bought some burgers that were twice the price of what I normally buy, they said the beef came from three cuts of meat to give it a better texture and flavour. They didn't taste any meatier than what I already buy as I buy high-end as it is and the taste was no more special so they were not worth twice the price.

I often see chocolate in really posh boxes with a ribbon tied around them, not novelty chocolate but high quality. I thought it was worth seeing what all the fuss was about. I could appreciate that they were indeed of a higher production quality but they were something I would have once a year, not even once a month. Not just due to the cost (5 times more than my favourite Lindt bar) but they were too rich in taste for my liking.

What do you think?

Are there any products that you simply must of a certain quality and do you have any tips for products we should all buy at the cheapest price possible as there really is no difference in taste?

by KevinUK on 24 June 2011

Step 5: Promote yourself (and your food blog)

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:44:27 Z

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 1: Blogging overview
Step 2: Choose a blogging platform
Step 3: Choose a hosting provider
Step 4: Buy a domain name
Step 5: Promote yourself (and your food blog)
Step 6: Monitor your blog content
Step 7: Set up social sharing (Internet word of mouth)
Step 8: Get people to follow your obsession with food
Step 9: Branding - start with a logo
Step 10: Site design (content is king, design is queen)
Step 11: Meet other food bloggers

Step 5: Promote yourself (and your food blog)

On the Web

Once you have some blog posts, you will want to publicise your blog a bit, to let people know that it exists. You can start by adding your blog to the GetMeCooking Food Blog Directory, which is like a telephone directory for food blogs.

The best way to promote your blog though, is to visit other blogs, see what’s going on and contribute by commenting and getting involved in discussions. Once people see that you have something to offer or are an expert (or at least actively involved) in your area, they will be interested to find out more about you – and that is when they click on your link to visit your blog.

When posting on blogs and websites, watch out for the ‘nofollow’ command. You can only see this by looking at the HTML code of the page you are on. nofollow means that if you post your link to that website, search engines (such as Google) will not follow the link to your website (or at least they will give you no or few ‘points’ for it – this is informally referred to as ‘Google juice’). It is fine to add your blog address to websites that use the nofollow rule, but your time ‘may’ be better spent posting on other sites. On GetMeCooking we do not use the nofollow command on user comments because we like to help promote the blogging community. For more information, see the Google Webmasters page on About rel="nofollow”.

Social Media

You can also use other social media to help build an audience and in turn promote your blog.

twitter

twitter is a ‘micro-blogging’ tool that allows you to sent messages (tweets) of up to 140 characters in length. It is great for when you are on the move, or just want to sent out a quick message to let ‘the world’ know what you are doing, something exciting that you have just seen or done or about a blog post you have just added.

On the GetMeCooking twitter feed we often post about fun, exciting or interesting food related news items (usually not GetMeCooking related), as well as important/major updates about the GetMeCooking website. It is a great way to interact with the cooking community.

twitter Lists

On twitter, you can organise people and companies that you follow into lists. On the GetMeCooking twitter feed, we have a number of lists that include food bloggers, food companies, food events, etc. It is a useful to browse a list to get a quick ‘catch up’ on what is happening in that ‘space’.

su.pr

su.pr is the URL shortening service, owned by Stumbleupon. It integrates with twitter to allow you to post tweets, using shortened URL’s.

It then does these things:

Monitors how many times each URL has been clicked on
Builds a profile, allowing you to determine the best days and times to send out tweets (i.e. when they are most likely to be read)
Allows you categorise each URL you have tweeted, meaning that su.pr is then able to better integrate it within its Stumbleupon service
Adds it to the Stumbleupon service, where users can ‘randomly’ discover new websites, that are relevant to them (users tell Stumbleupon which categories they are interested in – e.g. food, cooking, blogging, baking, cycling, holidays)

Therefore using su.pr helps give your content a wider audience. If your audience like it, they will give it a ‘thumbs up’, which will raise its ranking in the Stumbleupon service, therefore helping it to be shown to other users.

facebook

facebook can be a great way to build up and audience and interact with them. To do this, create a facebook group for your blog and post some interesting content. The content in here shouldn’t simply be a copy of content that you post on twitter and your blog – people don’t like to see the same content in several places.

facebook groups can be a good way to interact with your visitors, like you would in an online forum. It is also a good place to post photographs and create events.

Offline (the real world!)

As well as promoting yourself online, it is fun to talk to people about food offline! Everybody likes food and if you tell people that you have a food based blog, people will want to find out more – so it’s a good idea to always have some business cards stored in your purse/wallet.

Step 6: Monitor your blog traffic

by Paul on 24 June 2011

Step 4: Buy a domain name

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 13:22:12 Z

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 4: Buy a domain name

A domain name is the website (or blog) address, e.g. http://www.getmecooking.com

You don’t need a domain name if you are just starting out, but if you do have one:

Your blog will look more professional
It will be easier for visitors to remember your blog address
If you move blogs or hosting providers, you can take your domain name with you

Some easy steps for getting a domain name are:

Think of some names (this is the hardest part!)
See if your name is available with the domain suffix you want. In order to protect your name, you may want to register multiple domain name suffixes (e.g. .com, .co.uk, .info, etc.). you can use one domain and point all of the other domains do your preferred domain. For example, if you go to http://www.getmecooking.co.uk, you will be redirected to http://www.getmecooking.com
If a name you want is not available, you can see if it is in use, on retention or due to expire soon
Before you buy it, check to see if the name is available on twitter, facebook and any other social networks that you think you might want to use in the future

We recommend Go Daddy for the whole domain name process – they have great tools for finding a good one, seeing if it is available, purchasing and managing it.

The www debate:

Some websites use www the prefix, some dont and some allow either.

Without www: http://getmecooking.com
With www: http://www.getmecooking.com

It is good practice to enforce the www because:

Non-technical users expect to see it there
It makes it clear that it is a website and not an FTP (or other) type of site
Static content (including cookies and images) can be properly managed
Having www and non www addresses can cause search engines to think that you have 2 copies of the site and they may penalise you for that (i.e. for copying data). Some search engines such as Google allow you to tell them which is the preferred domain, but you don't want to do this as it is manual effort

When enforcing the www, you should also do an HTTP 301 redirect from the non www address to the www address. We use a 301 redirect so that when visitors go to http://getmecooking.com, they get redirected to http://www.getmecooking.com.

Step 5: Promote yourself (and your food blog)

by Paul on 19 June 2011

Step 3: Choose a hosting provider

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 21:06:46 Z

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 3: Choose a hosting provider

If you are using these blogging platforms, you can ignore this step, as they do not require self-hosting:

If you use these blogging platforms, you will need to have your blog hosted (installed) on a web server:

As we mentioned before, we prefer WordPress; but they do all each have their pros and cons. Please see the ‘WordPress Web Hosting’ page for hosting providers that WordPress recommend.

You can move your content between blogs by exporting content from the old one and importing it into the new one. It it not always straight-forward though, especially if you have custom content such as templates. WordPress have an ‘Importing Content’ page which describes how to do this.

Step 4: Buy a domain name

by Paul on 15 June 2011

Site update

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 20:42:52 Z

It has been a busy few weeks here at GetMeCooking. Here is a quick summary of some new features we’ve added:

New Recipe Search

Our initial plan was to get a basic page up to listing all of the recipes and then to make a feature-rich page once we had enough recipes to warrant it. Well, that time has come!

This has meant integrating search features into the user profile page – which links me nicely to...

Improved User Profile Settings

You can now specify all food allergies and ingredients that you don’t like (and soon any dietary requirements e.g. Vegan). Recipe selections (on the recipe search page) will automatically be filtered based on what you don’t like/want and will also be used to better recommend recipes in the 'you may also like' box on the recipe pages. This saves you time and means you can spend less time worrying and more time looking at recipes you will actually enjoy.

General Tweaks

We have already made some tweaks all over the site to make it look nicer and be more approachable, expect those changes to keep coming this week.

Speed Improvements

We are also continuing to make speed improvements. We have put a lot of effort into making us the fastest recipe site on the Internet. We use Google Page Speed Online to see what they suggest we should change and to compare ourselves to our competitors.

The scores suggest that our site is far more optimised (and therefore faster) than other cooking sites! See for yourself by using Google Page Speed (enter www.getmecooking.com and other food websites - the higher the number, the more optimised the site is for performance). We also use Google Analytics to monitor, track and help us improve page speed throughout the site.

by KevinUK on 14 June 2011

Step 2: Choose a blogging platform

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 13:31:39 Z

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 2: Choose a blogging platform

A blogging platform is the tool used to host the blog. There are several to choose from and most have free and paid versions. Most bloggers blog entirely on free platforms. Some start of on free platforms and then migrate to paid versions when they require the additional features (such as a customised design or additional functionality).

Some of the popular blogging platforms are:

When starting out, it doesn’t actually matter which blogging platform you use. They are all easy to use and all fairly similar in functionality. What matters most is ‘putting pen to paper’ (or fingers to keyboard!), to get some content on the screen. Once you have a few blog posts on the Internet and you think that this blogging thing is good fun, you can then start thinking about a long-term home for your blog.

Most blogging platforms will let you export and import content. This means that you can move your content (blog posts) from one platform to another fairly easily.

Having said that, the platforms that we would recommend are WordPress.com (free and easy to use) and WordPress.org (free, easy to use, highly customisable but requires hosting). You could start blogging with WordPress.com and then transfer to WordPress.org if you feel you want additional features.

WordPress.org is a self-hosted solution. This means that although the software is free, you have to host it yourself (or have someone host it for you).

WordPress.org blogs allow new functionality to be added via ‘plugins’. This is software that can be easily ‘plugged into’ your WordPress installation. We are working on a plugin – details coming soon!

Step 3: Choose a hosting provider

by Paul on 14 June 2011

Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger - Step 1: Blogging overview

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 12:21:40 Z

Being a food blogger is a lot of fun. Through it you can tell the world who you are and what you are interested in; plus you can (and invariably will) make new friends and learn a lot about food. The food blogging community is a friendly one and far larger than you might think.

It is easy to get started with food blogging and it doesn’t require a University degree in computing, however it can be a bit confusing at first if you don’t know where to start. So here is the GetMeCooking step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger. This series will give you some great tips on how to attract more visitors to your blog, convert visitors into followers and how to monetise.

Note that these steps do not all have to be completed in the order shown.

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 1: Blogging overview

The article ‘Why be a food blogger?’ gives some reasons why you might want to start blogging about food.

It helps if you know up-font exactly what you would like to blog about, as this will help set the tone and direction of the blog. Having said that, in most cases the direction will change and the blog will evolve (and that’s okay)! If you keep writing about what you are passionate about, you won’t get bored and your readers will see your enthusiasm.

The video interview ‘Blogging for Startups’ (which is broken down into sections) is well worth watching as they discuss:

The benefits of blogging (from a business perspective)
Which software to use (see section 2)
How to generate traffic (visitors to your site)
How to convert traffic into followers (such as e-mail subscribers) and customers

Step 2: Choose a blogging platform

by Paul on 09 June 2011

We have a new logo!

Sat, 07 May 2011 16:04:44 Z

Hopefully you have noticed our shiny new logo at the top of this site! Or perhaps you saw it first on our twitter or facebook pages?

Actually we are having problems getting it to look nice on facebook, but we are looking into it (if you know how to get it to look good on there, please let us know!).

We will be updating the watermark in the photographs with the new logo soon.

If you are interested in how we got the new logo and how much we paid for it, see the blog post I wrote 3 days ago.

by Paul on 07 May 2011

New Logo for GetMeCooking

Wed, 04 May 2011 10:46:35 Z

As mentioned in my previous blog post, one of our next steps is to improve the visual design of this website.

In our heads, Kevin and I know the sort of look and feel that we want the site to take on, but we haven't yet found any design companies that are a good fit for us (yes, we are that fussy!).

Most designers will tell you that any branding should start with the logo. From the logo will come the evolution of the website, in terms of colours used and style.

All of the design companies that we spoke with have roughly the same formula which is 1-2 days concept (thinking time), produce 3 designs to the client, then the client has to go with 1, which will be tweaked a bit more. We really didn't like the sound of this, so we decided to try 99designs.

We have been aware of 99designs for a long time, but have been a bit reluctant to try them. Our thinking was that we wanted to work with a design company in order to work with professional people who would understand our vision - but as that didn't happen, we decided to investigate 99designs a bit more :-)

It turns out that 99designs has a money back guarantee, so if you don't like any of the designs, you can get your money back - well that sounded fair enough, so we went for it. Before setting up a contest, I had a few chat sessions with various 99design staff via the live chat interface on their website. All the staff were very friendly and knowledgeable, which gave me more reassurance.

So, we set up the contest 'Create the next logo for GetMeCooking', at a custom price point of $700, non-guaranteed (so we can get our money back if we don't like any of the designs) and open (so anyone can view the contest).

We chose the price point of $700 because it was just $5 above most others and to our surprise it has meant that since the contest was launched, we have been near the top of the first page the whole time! This has meant that we have had more views and entries than most of the other contests. In fact, over the past 6 days, we have had 566 entries from 40 designers! Some of them are very good (you can see which logos we have eliminated and rated). We really like a few of them, so our next logo could well be in there! There is still 1 day left if you want to enter :-)

by Paul on 04 May 2011

Under the bonnet - recent website improvements

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 21:58:23 Z

As stated on our About page, Kevin and I are both technically focused and we are eager to develop the best recipe site on the Internet. Over the past few months, we have been working hard on a number of improvements – most of which you will not see!

Search Engine Optimisation

Last year the Bing (and a few weeks ago, Google) search engines, introduced recipe search functions into their standard search results. Information on each are here: Bing Recipes and Google Recipe Search.

The recipe functionality is currently only available within the USA, but should make its way to other countries later. For recipes to be included in the search results, the search engines need to be able to read and identify the components of a recipe (e.g. title, ingredients, cooking time, photographs, etc.). This is done using metadata. To be included in this, we have added microformats (hRecipe) data to all of our recipes and user profiles.

HTML 5

We have reworked the site to use HTML 5 specific elements. In addition, we are now using the best practices as described on HTML5BoilerPlate; which has made the site faster and smaller in filesize.

humans.txt

An idea thought up by the team at humans.txt, the humans.txt file is (usually) stored in http://<website-url>/humans.txt Although there is no set standard, it is generally intended to be a quick and easy way to find out a bit about the team behind websites – like credits to a film or a book.

We have added one (http://www.getmecooking.com/humans.txt) which hopefully we will be able to expand upon in the future!

It is quite new, so not many sites have a humans.txt file yet. But if you are curious, you can install a plugin for your browser, which will inform you when a site you visit has one.

Content

A recipe site isn’t much use if there aren’t many recipes on it. Most recipe websites have a large database of thousands of recipes, but the quality of many of the recipes is poor – i.e. they do not have a photograph of the finished recipe, the list of ingredients is incomplete or incorrect, the instructions are not displayed as easy to follow steps and may be poorly worded.

On GetMeCooking, we only want to store recipes that are of good quality. Every recipe must have a photograph (of a reasonable standard) and the ingredients and instructions are manually reviewed for spelling, grammar and other mistakes.

We have a plan in progress to get more content, which we think will be a great win-win for GetMeCooking as well as the wider cooking community. The people we have spoken to about it think so too. More details on this later.

Visual Design

We are currently writing a visual design specification document (including wireframing a few new functional aspects) and are aiming to get the site professionally designed soon.

We have already whittled down very long list of design companies to a select few. For us, the site needs to be easy to read, simple to use (all the clever functionality should be done in the background – transparent to the user), fast, no hidden menus and intuitive, so we are being very strict on the design.

Recipe Search

Right now our recipe search page is very basic – not good at all. We have a plan for this which is very innovative, rich in functionality, user-centric but very easy to use. We would like some help with the look of it, so will liaise with the visual design company to help make it excellent.

Website Infrastructure

We currently run the website (plus a few other websites) on a server that we built ourselves from old PC’s. Its performance far exceeds our requirements but there is only 1, so it is not resilient (to hardware/network/other problems). We have looked into hosting the site on 2 servers in 2 different (privately owned) data-centres, RackSpace Cloud Hosting, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure.

We decided to try Microsoft Windows Azure, so we have transferred the site onto there and it works well. The only problem is that if we migrate to Azure, we will need to find a home for our e-mail and Subversion (code repository) – but we have done some investigation and we think we have found some good service providers for these.

In Summary

So as you can see, we have been very busy! All of the core functionality has been working (and proven) for well over a year; the speed of the site is very good, as is the reliability. Now we are working on getting more content, involving the wider community, making things easier and nicer to use and building on the system architecture. We hope you continue to enjoy using the site. Please comment below to let us know how we’re doing!

by Paul on 05 April 2011

Weekend links #24

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 22:48:14 Z

Feeling hungry? Then how about a KFC Double Down Sandwich which comprises of two chicken fillets (in place of bread), two rashers of bacon, two slices of cheese and the Colonels sauce.

Or if that isn't enough for you, how about the Burger King Quad Stacker. It has four lots of everything - beef, cheese and bacon!

In a time when the whole world is looking to be more healthy, it is a bit disapointing when large fast food chains bring out new large items.

It's not just the items on the menu that can be gross or misleading. The menu is often engineered to 'trick' the customer into choosing the items that are most profitable for the restaurant.

by Paul on 02 January 2011

Weekend links #23

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 20:52:03 Z

18.7% of children in England leave primary school obese according to the latest statistics. This isn't good. The Jamie Oliver School Dinners program has helped, as has increased food eduction in schools (which still isn't essential), but more needs to be done - both at school and at home.

An interesting (and perhaps surprising) look at the growth of the top four supermarkets in the UK from 2004 to 2010.

Do you get competitive when cooking for your friends and family? Is good presentation a must, or is it enough just for it to taste good?

by Paul on 26 December 2010