Do You Make These 5 Mistakes with Salt in Recipes?

by diannejacob on September 24, 2013

Using-Salt-in-RecipesWhenever I edit recipes, I feel my blood pressure rising (and I haven’t even consumed the salt yet!) Three things about using salt set me off:

Why do so many recipes fail to specify the amount of salt? Why do recipes say to season with salt when you can’t know if you’re adding the right amount? Why do recipes say to add salt at the wrong time?

As you know, I have opinions on recipe writing, and specifying salt is no exception. Here’s my take on where many recipes go wrong, and how to fix them:

1. Adding “to taste” to salt in the ingredients list. The ingredients list comes before [click to continue…]

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Agent Couldn’t Sell Her Memoir, so Cookbook Author Publishes it Anyway

by diannejacob on September 17, 2013

Kitty-Morse

It took Kitty Morse 10 years to write her memoir. Her agent couldn’t sell it, even though she was an award-winning cookbook author. (Photo by Owen Morse.)

A guest post by Kitty Morse

As a cookbook writer with nine books under my belt, I always harbored a desire to write a memoir centered around Dar Zitoun, the riad that my father willed my brothers and me 50 miles south of my native Casablanca. I fantasized about writing my own story, free of editorial constraints such as word counts. But how? I was just a cookbook writer.

Frances Mayes’ bestselling Under the Tuscan Sun provided the impetus I sought. Her stories of restoring a Tuscan farmhouse struck me as similar to those I experienced at Dar Zitoun. I too was living on two continents and learning to deal with [click to continue…]

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5 New Food Magazines to Pitch

September 10, 2013

Perhaps you’re in a rut, writing for the same publication, and it’s time to branch out? Or maybe you’re comfortable blogging but you’d like to try writing for magazines? Whatever the reason, it’s always exciting to see a new crop of magazines. Here’s a short list of what emerged recently, followed by tips on how […]

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10 More Links for Food Bloggers and Writers

September 4, 2013

A while ago I decided to start sharing links from my quarterly newsletter. The post was so successful, ricocheting around Twitter and Facebook, that I’ve decided to post a list after each newsletter comes out. So, in the meantime, sign up for the Will Write for Food newsletter. You’ll get only four emails per year, with […]

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Use Active Verbs to Enliven Recipes

August 27, 2013

Last week I aroused passions about passive voice in recipes, not only here in the comments but on Facebook and Twitter. My point was that cooking is an activity, so we need direct language that shows action. Active verbs are the ticket, an effective and efficient way to show movement. In these examples below, you […]

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What’s With Passive Instruction in Recipes?

August 20, 2013

In every writing class or book about writing, it says: Avoid passive voice. (Passive voice is when you don’t identify the person or thing doing the action. It’s considered lazy and imprecise, everything that recipe writing is not.) I do my best to remove it when I edit. Yet I read dozens of published recipe […]

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