Welcome to bite size kitchen!

At long last, the day has come. This blog is the culmination of about five years of my partner being subjected on the regular to both my cooking as well as having to listen to my unwarranted commentary on the cookbooks and food blogs I was consulting for recipes and him saying "you should start your own blog then" and me saying "well maybe I will." I'm nothing if not a person of my word, so it may have taken five years, but I have come through in the end. I'm excited to finally be here, and happy you've found your way here to join me too!

So, hello, and welcome to the blog! I'm sure no one is here to read a novel and I promise I'll post some actual recipes and content soon, but I did just want to take the first post as a moment to go over some basic things to keep in mind for when I do start getting some recipes up here.

Notes on the Recipes

Measurements

It seems a little inconvenient to me that there's no standardized measurement system for pretty much any aspect of cooking that is widely accepted universally, but it do just be like that I guess. So that we're all on the same page, here's what I use:

• 1 cup = 240mL = 8 fl oz

• 1 Tbsp = 15mL = 0.5 fl oz

• 1 tsp = 5mL

I personally also find it really tedious to continually have to tab out to Google conversions (especially if reading recipes on mobile while in the kitchen), so I'll do my best to include cup/Tbsp/tsp, mL, and g measurements in recipe posts as much as possible, as well as to list temperatures in both °F and °C.

There are also times where measurements might be more subjective. For example, I can list an ingredient of "1 medium potato / 200g potato". Your medium potato you have kicking around your house and available for use might be 220g. Is it worth the headache or waste to save or discard the extra 20g difference from what I used? Probably not. Just use your 220g potato. Chances are good it probably won't really make a super noticeable difference, and if it is something I know will, then I'll make an effort to note that directly in the recipe.

Batch/Serving Sizes

I never thought I'd have to do so much math when I started cooking, but wow. It seems the vast majority of recipes are written for four to six servings, or usually batches of 12-24 for baked goods. This is great if you have a family of four. In my household of only two though, this usually results in struggling to finish too many leftovers in an effort to not waste, or having to scale down every recipe.

Because I have no life, I looked into the Stats Can census data (sorry anyone reading internationally) to see if most households are actually four people. If most households are in fact four people, then I suppose it makes sense to write recipes for four and I'll choke that one down and do my math.

Turns out that in the 2021 census, one person households and couple family households without children made up over 50% of households. So really, by the numbers it does make more sense to default to smaller recipe sizes, and I'm not just being self-centered and lazy by writing my recipes specific to my own situation.

Anyways, all this goes to say that generally the recipes you'll find here will yield batches that are on the smaller side, and if you are looking to make more you might need to do some of your own calculating. Some things do get a little wonky for scaling (it's a pain to try and get half an egg, and hard to find a use for the other half but a shame to waste it), so I'll try and put in the notes some recommendations for these types of situations when I notice they come up.

Calorie and Nutritional Estimates

At the moment I'm still exploring the options for embedding recipes in my posts and I feel like some tools probably have automated nutritional info calculators that are based on ingredient lists. As I am not currently using anything like that though, and honestly do not have the time or energy to manually calculate all aspects of nutritional info for every recipe, nutritional info for recipes will likely be limited to caloric estimates.

I also intend to include options for substitutions for ingredients in my recipe posts, which can sometimes have a pretty significant difference in the number of estimated calories for a dish. I'll try to clarify as much as it's reasonable to do so what I'm basing my numbers off of, but if you're making lots of subs and keeping track of calories is something you're concerned about then you might have to do a bit of your own math.

Tools and Equipment

I aim to present options for both if readers have or do not have certain equipment. I find having time estimates for certain processes in recipes helpful and so will include them where I can in my posts. Keeping in mind though that these measurements can often depend on many things like cooking environment and equipment quality/performance, I'll also try and describe other cues and indicators you can use to assess when something is ready.

Most of my kitchen appliances and utensils are off-brand knock-offs of questionable quality, so as a general rule if you're using brand name powerhorses (then first of all I'm a little jealous..), then you'll probably often be finding that you're done things quicker than the time estimates I'm giving.

That's all I can think to mention at the moment, but if anything is ever confusing feel free to drop a comment and I'd be happy to do my best to clear things up. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you'll stay tuned as I get some real content up and that you'll find something here that you like!