Beginning
I am pretty passionate about cooking. When trying a new dish I try it over and over again until I get it down to what I expect it to taste like. Especially with breads I remember trying for months to get recipes right before being satisfied with the result and moving on to new recipes. My approach back then however had one flaw. I never wrote down my recipes. Coming back to an already perfected loaf, just to realize that I missed something, and it does not taste as I want it to taste was very frustrating.
At one point I realized that I had to finally start writing down my recipes.
Intentions and Purpose
Writing down recipes, fails, tips and tricks and potential tweaks for the next try really helps me step up my cooking game. Its the little things that can really make a big difference, things that one would forget after half a year not cooking a certain dish. This was and still is the main purpose of this blog.
After some time however I realized that it would be nice to share recipes with friends and family directly, other than sending them via email or other channels. So I made this blog public though its purpose kept being mostly the same as when it was private, writing down my recipes.
Disclaimer
This blog is my digital notebook for recipes. Posts are supposed to be guidelines for myself and may or may not contain false or incomplete information. I am no expert in anything food related and do not assume liability in case you use, try or apply information found on this blog.
Also note that the notes I took are valid for my context. My oven might be a bit less powerful than yours and there for the listed temperatures might be a bit off compared to yours. My used flour might absorb more water than yours and there for the hydration of a bread recipe might be too high for you. In general, use my recipes as guidelines rather than follow them 1:1 exactly.
Last but not least, don’t take any statement in this blog literally. I did (and certainly still do) have some big typos and misspells in my posts. ‘Worm milk’ (warm milk) or ‘mousse au chocolate is a desert’ (dessert) are just some examples.
Feedback
For now I decided to not integrate Staticman or similar tools for commenting in the blog.
If you have some feedback or inspirations feel free to reach out either via twitter or email recipes.martinew@gmail.com.
Tech
I started this blog on a WordPress site hosted on my private NAS. WordPress has its ups, however it has a lot of overhead for running it. When deciding to go public I searched for a free and easy to host solution and decided to use a static site generator.
The first two years I ran Gatsby using a slightly adapted gatsby-theme-nehalem. GitHub and Netlify allowed for free hosting and easy deployment.
Old blog main site:
Old blog post view:
In general, I was super happy with the template. At one point however I tried to update all dependencies as well as dockerizing Gatsby with this template, and I failed miserably. I decided to try out Hugo using the parsa-hugo theme and instantly fell in love with the setup. Build times were much, much faster, there were way fewer dependencies and dockerizing was a piece of cake.
New blog main site:
New site post view:
While there are some differences in layout and features I really enjoyed the new site. The only downside with this setup was that I had to change the internal content. In gatsby I had my images in the same folders as the markdown files, and their url path was defined by a header field, rather than their placement within the content folder structure. In hugo however the files sit in a content folder while the images live in a static folder, and their path is defined by folder structure name of the markdown file. In addition, the header was quite different in the two themes, though both issues were easily solved via python script.
The content split however still annoyed me as I now had to create two folder structures for images and markdown files. I tackled this issue by making heavy use of python scripts during post creation. The migration and development environment setup was a nice holiday project and in the end writing a new post is now less effort than it was before. The site is faster, my whole development environment is dockerized and hugo should be more future proof.
TODOs
Currently, there are a few things on my todo list.
loading issue of site on first call can appear (refreshing page does fix issue)(done)- create a new logo
- cleanup of content folder structure (introduced during gatsby migration)
- automate link check
automate file move(done)- automate link correction
check recipes with tables. they seem to be faulty due to migration error from gatsby to hugo(done)enable disappearing header on scroll down on mobile(done)add images to searchadd spellchecking to the IDE for new posts- spellcheck old posts automatically via AI