FAQ

Who takes the pictures on your blog?

Me! Some of the travel ones are taken by F. but unless otherwise indicated all photos are mine. Please don’t judge me harshly; I haven’t got any photography experience other than what I have gleaned from blogging…

I can’t find the recipe I want – I saw it last week/month, help!

There is a recipe index in the navigation bar at the top where all the recipes on the site are grouped according to the possibly crazy logic in my head.

You can also use the search bar which is at the top of the sidebar, or click on one of the category pictures down the sidebar.

If you like a recipe, you can click on the “categories” at the top of the post which will bring you to a page with other recipes in the same category such as season, country or dietary preference, or “tags” at the bottom of the post which will bring you to a page that has recipes that include the same ingredients as the one you’re looking at.

If you don’t always write a recipe list at the beginning then how can I assemble the ingredients?

Either the ingredients *are* in a list or they are in green in the body of the text, so don’t worry, all ingredients should stand out if you need them for a shopping list or something. I write recipes like this when I think it makes more sense in real-time, for example when you are doing something with a group of ingredients first and need to leave them to cool so you have plenty of time to gather ingredients for, and do, the next bit.

What does “sunakku” mean?

Technically it’s the Japanese pronunciation for “snack,” because you know, I love snacks…but it can also mean, uh, a hostess bar. And I don’t mean that as a euphemism – it’s usually a small neighbourhood bar where worn out ole salarymen go to sing karaoke embarassingly badly in the company of the hostess, or mama-san, surprisingly usually a woman rather longer in the tooth than you’d imagine and often fairly unglamorous to boot.

What is a subscription?

Until about 3 months ago February 2010, I had no idea what a blog subscription was or what the point of having one would be either but I’m glad I found out.

If you want new posts to be sent to your email address which you presumably check regularly, instead of going to the bother of checking a site when there might not even be any new posts up since your last visit, email subscription is for you. Then you’ll know when there’s something worth having a look at – and you can click through to the site itself from the link in the email if you want to leave a comment or look at an older post.

To subscribe by email you just type your email address in the box in the sidebar where it says “subscribe by email” and click the button to send. You will then receive an email with a link to click to confirm your subscription. Every time a new post is up, you’ll receive it just like a regular email.

If you leave a comment and want to be notified of any follow-up comments or replies then you can click on the “subscribe to comments” box under where you type in your comment.

This next option is only really worth it for people who read a lot of sites that are regularly updated (ie: blogs). To subscribe through a reader, you have to have set one up through a provider such as Google. If you have a Gmail account, in the top left corner there is a list of links that says things like “Documents” “Web” “Calendar” and “Reader.” You just click on “Reader” and will end up on a page which is basically like an empty online magazine waiting for you to fill it up with subscriptions to sites you like.

You can add sites in one of two ways. The first is to search the name of the site in your reader where it says “Add a subscription.” It will find the site for you and you just click to confirm the subscription. The second is to find where it says something like “subscribe by RSS” or “subscribe to feed” on any site you wish to subscribe to. It will then automatically open up the reader you have and ask you whether you want to confirm.

Now that I’m addicted reading food blogs, this saves me a lot of time since I don’t have to look to see whether there are new posts on 20 different sites. Instead I can just open the reader and it it will show me all the new material with a link I can click on to take me through to the actual site in a new window.

What sort of cup measurements have you given?

Here’s a little disclaimer: I haven’t tested the recipes in cups, I always weigh. Sorry, but if you’re a cup-using Luddite, the management takes all care but no responsibility (don’t you hate it when signs say that, I mean *how annoying*).

American cups are 240 ml while NZ, Australian and Canadian and most English (a.k.a. metric) cups are 250ml and just to confuse things further, imperial cups are 284 ml but hardly anyone uses those in recipes so I wouldn’t worry too much.

If a recipe I have used has given both measurements, I have taken them directly from there. Where only a weight is given, I have used this great conversion site which gives weights and volumes for sugar, flours, butter and temperature in various permutations and used the American.

My advice? Go buy a scale.