Do you like to eat? Do you enjoy cooking? Then read on!

When you click on a recipe blog, what do you expect? Basically, the ingredients, and the steps to make it in an easy-to-follow format. Preferably accompanied by a picture or two. Done, and most of the time, that’s all you ever need anyway.

You check which ingredients you have and which ones you need to go get, and try to understand the steps. Go to Yoon Foong Supermarket, by the stuff you need, get back home and try to repeat the steps as best as you could. Voila ~ Few hours later, you would have a pot of hot steaming sup tulang or hot-from-the-oven apple pie or a plate of spaghetti carbonara.

However, there has to be more that you can get from a recipe blog, and those of you who are interested to share recipes, can take these into consideration!

Share Tips
“If you use this, your cake would be fluffier”, or “if you use that, your cookie would looked swollen”. “If you do this, your lauk can stay longer in the open”, and “if you do that, your vegetable will go soggy very fast”.

Use this, use that. Do this, do that – share all the tips you have to improve a recipe or make sure it comes out perfectly.

• Like, I didn’t know this until recently – that before you cut a cucumber into thin slices, you’re supposed to cut a little of the top part of it, and rub that bit on the cut-out part – if not the cucumber would taste bitter.
• And I just learned yesterday that you can’t mix honey in a dish that includes onion, or else it has a poisonous effect that will affect you slowly.
• Oh, and speaking of onions, personally I would blow air out of my mouth while I chop the onions, and this prevents me from ‘crying’! You’ll look funny – like you’re jogging while cutting onions, but it works! Try it!

Include these kind of tips when you share your recipes – and it will make the difference!

Share Family Recipes
I’m sure you have a few ‘priceless’ recipes that you don’t mind sharing with the readers. One that’s not from a cookbook, or a website. It’s just the way your mom or opah used to make. Usually, these recipes have ‘secret’ ingredients that make it special enough to be passed down for generation.

Spread the aroma, open up your secret recipe! Readers would appreciate your willingness to share, and yours would be the only blog with this kind of recipe.

Picture Perfect
Personally, I feel that this is a very important part of a recipe blog. Some recipe blogs do away with pictures, but most of it glorify the food even more with a gorgeous representation of the dish.

You pictures should/could be :

• Clear and sharp – definitely looks more tantalizing
• Preferably in a close-up shot – you can see the ingredients clearly, and how it looks like when done
• You can have a few pictures placed in sequence – a visualization of your step-by-step section. Instead of writing them down, you have in a few pictures that describes what should be done

Oh, and photography is art, and art should involve being creative. There’s a recipe blog that I came across where she took the trouble to put some items that’s connected to the dish she just made. For example, she placed some carrots, and a rabbit stuffed toy next to her carrot cake. Her pictures are always interesting and cute with appropriate decor – just like in a magazine or a recipe book!

It takes a little effort, but your readers will appreciate it very much. It makes your dish looks extra irresistable!

Substitution
When blogging on a recipe you got from a website or cookbook, you can always substitute certain ingredients for another, or change it for something else. This may be because you don’t have some of the stuff needed for the recipe, or you do it by choice to get a different taste.

Like instead of santan, you use milk, or instead of chocolate powder, you choose milo and instead of cornflakes, you use nestum. If you want a more colorful cookie, you may want to use colorful choc rice than the normal choc rice. To make nasi minyak, sometimes I just use plain butter when I am out of ghee! Hey, it tasted just as yummy!

Advantages:

• It can make it easier for your readers who want to try your recipe but lack certain ingredients
• It’s a bold challenge for those who want to try something different
• Changing certain ingredients from the orginal recipe may also change the end-taste, texture or appearance according to what you like – for example, in bread pudding, I always substitute raisins for choc chip instead, because though I like to eat raisins on its own, I dislike anything with raisins in it!
• Readers may try the recipe using your ingredients of choice and the original one, and see which one they like better

However, it’s only fair to tell your readers what the original ingredients are, before telling them what you finally used, and let them make the choice.

Make It Your Own
This is slightly connecting to Substitution. When you have surfed for a lot of cheesecake recipes for example, and found that you could substitute some ingredients, you can experimentally alter and modify few stuff here and there, especially if you have tried baking a few times to see what worked and what didn’t.

You can even blog about your adventures of trying different ingredients in baking a cheesecake.

Finally, you’ll find that you have got yourself your own personal cheesecake recipe that’s truly yours. Sure, you took some ideas from here and there but your personal substitution is what makes your cake special!

Cooking Adventures : Hits and Misses
So you’ve had a disastrous experience while trying out a recipe – Muffins that can make holes when you throw it to a wall, a very soggy lasagna, burnt roast chicken or a very bitter soup that tasted like something a woman drinks during her confinement or pantang!

Hey, take it easy – It’s all part of the adventure and experience! It’s okay to share it. When you blog your recipe, you can add this story as a light ‘snack’ for your recipe blog.

Look on the bright side -

• You learned what not to do and can warn others
• You can help others to be wary not to repeat your mistake
• It’s funny and it makes you human because human makes mistake
• It makes the readers comfortable – if they screw up the dish, they know you can screw up too and still manage to come up with a delicious dish in the end
• It also gives the readers a motivation to keep on trying if the dish didn’t come up as they should during their first try!

Add Anecdotes
I highly recommend a short brief little story in a recipe blog. For example is it your kid’s favorite, or maybe you learned it from your mom or grandma, or it’s a special request from your dear husband. Perhaps it could be something you’ve been craving or simply a must-have dish on Hari Raya.

It adds a personal touch to your recipe and it’s also a good intro to why you enjoy making that particular dish.

Introduce Cultural Dishes
Speaking of Hari Raya, recipe blog is also a way to introduce cultural dish like chee cheong fun, laksa sarawak, rendang tok from your kampung or sweet pengat sotong from Kelantan. Not only foreigners but even Malaysians like me would be interested to learn about a dish that comes specially from certain part of the country.

• It enriches cultural knowledge in terms of food like origin
• You’d be introducing your hometown or kampung to your readers
• You not only be talking about the food, but the occasion or festive day when the food is specially eaten like pulut kuning during aqiqah, the ‘four-season’ dish during a chinese wedding, lemang on hari raya or muruku on deepavali.

Where To Get the Ingredients
This is especially important for me who lives on a foreign land. I need all the help and tips I can get – like where to get the cheapest chicken, or where to get belacan or dried chilli. Thankfully finding halal meat is not a problem in Dubai, but for those living in the US or Europe countries it would probably be harder, so any info on that really helps.

You can name the exact hypermart or grocery shop where you got your ingredients. You can also provide info like which fish is fresher – the ones from hypermart A or B. You never know who you’re helping out there!

Tag it Well
When you write a posting, you put a tag on the entry. Grouped your recipes accordingly – chicken dish, vegetable, desserts, drinks, rice dish and so on. It makes navigation easier. It definitely helps you to search for old recipes too!

Products You Use
Recipe blog is also a way to share about the brand of ingredients and products available, or the ones that you actually use like bread maker, mixer or oven. You can state your preferance and why that one.

And I’m not sure about this because I’m very new to blogging for money – but I guess eventually if you’re good and influential enough, and your recipe blog gets a lot of traffic, you’d get paid to review certain kitchen gadgets or products, right? I’m not sure how a blogger can go about getting such a deal, so those in the know please share, yah?

Way to make money!

You Don’t Have to Be Chef Wan
Most important of all – (and also a reminder to me) you don’t have to be ‘Julie and Julia’ to be able to blog about food and recipes. Don’t worry if you can’t cook. You can write for others who are learning to cook.

For example, making fried rice or goreng pisang is so simple for those who are used to cooking – but how about people like me who has never in her life made a simple goreng pisang? A simple step-by-step entry on how to make goreng pisang would surely help, and I’m sure i’m not the only one it would benefit!

Expand Your Vocab, and Others Too
Recipes come with all sorts of fancy cooking terms – sautee, grill, bake, fry, flip, turn, sift and such. Do not assume everyone knows what ‘let it settle’ or ‘bring to boil’ mean. You can help simplify the terms in your own words, slang or your mother tongue.

Instead of ‘copy and paste’ an entire recipe with difficult jargons, you can always paraphrase – writing out the recipe and the steps in your own words and description. Instead of ‘bring to boil’, you can write, ‘wait for it to boil, then turn down the fire’. Who knows, maybe it can even help your own understanding when you look at it again after a year!

Add Nutritional Information
This takes a little more effort but you can include nutritional info of the ingredients. Just look at the ingredients and you can tell whether there’s MSG or not.

If you’re interested you can even google and find out more about what vitamins bananas can offer, or the benefits of ginger to women in confinement – and then share it together with your recipes.

Time to Blog!
Recipe blogs are perfectly fine if left at ‘ingredients’, ‘steps’ and ‘pictures’ only. But if you want to inspire, help others, share stories and basically do more for the blogging community and your readers, you may consider some of the points above and apply it the next time you want to share a recipe!

Happy cooking, happy sharing, and happy trying out recipes!

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