Blogging • Logistics • Recipes/Cooking

• This site is beastly cool. Who designed it? That would be me! I made it in the early moons of 2010, but it has gone through several large renovations with probably several more to come. I am impossibly picky and can never settle on one thing; also, I’m a perfectionist and will fiddle with this and that until it’s just right—meaning it will never be “right”.
• Can you help me design my website/blog? There are two ways you can get me to help you design your blog. One is to be one of my closest, coolest friends. The other is to pay a small fee of fifty million dollars.
• What tools do you use on your site? We use WordPress and an ever growing ever changing portfolio of plugins depending on what presently floats our boat. We host on godaddy.
• Meg, your photos and recipes are ballerifically good, but your writing seems to have been outsourced to a class of third graders. Please explain yourself. Though the writing is entirely my own, you can blame the spelling and grammar errors on my editor in chief. I am paying that guy way too much!
• Who writes your posts, Meg? I’m a little surprised at how often I get this question, but the answer is me! I write all of my own posts—who else would write them? The husband helps out with grammar and spelling, and occasionally offers a few ideas when I’m stuck or if he’s reviewing a post and gets particularly inspired, but virtually everything comes from my pen, err, keyboard, from my mind, in my words.
• There are ads on your site, Meg. Are you a sellout? The underlying question in this question is actually: are you trying to trick me to coming to your site so you can increase your viewership and make money off of my hapless mistake for trusting you? The short answer is no. There are a lot of blogs out there that try such gimmicks as link sharing, giveaways, mass commenting, etc to induce readers to visit their site. The Red Spoon is not such a site. Though we do have ads to hopefully pay for some of the sometimes pricey ingredients we use, and though we would love to have several million viewers a month, The Red Spoon exists much more as a form of self expression and forum for other foodies to find comradery than it does as a money making scheme. We further believe that the best way to increase viewership is through compelling, interesting content. Quite simply, if you get tricked into visiting a site, you probably won’t go back. If you genuinely enjoy a site, you’ll come back a lot. Concerning the ads, if you don’t like them, you can ignore them. If you like them, I invite you to ferociously click away at them.
• Is this like that movie, Julie & Julia? Besides sharing the commonalities of involving 1) cooking and 2) websites, no, this is nothing like Julie & Julia. Though a terrific film that is near and dear to my and many food bloggers’ hearts, to suppose that every food/cooking/baking blog created since Julie & Julia is like the film or in some way a result of the film is kind of a lot like supposing that haggis made since Braveheart is in some way inspired by it, or that everyone who makes a chair is in some way copying the original chair.

• I’m looking for a (insert name of highly sought after dish here) recipe, do you have one? We just might! We have a custom search bar in the top right corner of each page that might get you where you’re trying to be. There’s also an ever growing recipe index you can check out—it’s kind of like those pull out drawer card catalogs at oldschool libraries, only you don’t have to pull out a drawer and ours is way cooler.
• Is there a cool, hip way I can read Red Spoon recipes without dragging my laptop into the kitchen? Indeed, there is! We have a fancy “Print” button at the bottom of every recipe in the “Do More” section.
• Meg, sharing is caring. How do I share Red Spoon recipes with my friends who live far away? A solution! In the “Do More” section at the end of every recipe are various gizmos you can use to do cool things, including an “Email” option. Imagine your friend’s glee when they open their electronic mailbox and find a Red Spoon recipe!
• I used to like The Red Spoon newsletter when you guys were underground—now that you’re getting popular, how do I unsubscribe? Easy cheesy louisey! Just open up any of the newsletters you received in your email and click on the “unsubscribe now” link at the very bottom. If you change your mind, you can always sign up again the same way you did in the first place: through the “Subscribe by Email” button in the top bar.
• What does the red button do? What do you want the red button to do?

• I changed your recipe by adding this and removing that and changing my quantities and cooking times, and it was awful, hence, this must be an awful recipe! Very few comments induce cringes and thoughts of long walks on short piers than this one and variations of it. Though I’m all for sharing ideas and adapting recipes to your own taste, if you add/remove ingredients and/or change quantities and cooking times, you’ve created a new recipe and my recipe frankly isn’t responsible for the failure/success of your recipe. For that matter, if you stick directly to my recipe and it doesn’t work out for you, as sorry as I am to hear that, you have to realize that there are countless variables including altitude, oven size, oven brand, pan size/thickness, and where you bought your ingredients that could influence the outcome of your attempt. Some of the dishes that I make don’t turn out—if they make it to The Red Spoon, they are labeled as disasters. I can assure you, though, that I’m not making crappy food and taking pictures of it in hopes that you’ll try it and choke on it.
• Can I substitute abc ingredient for xyz ingredient in this recipe? You should try it! Post pictures on the Red Spoon Flickr photopool and let us know how it turned out!