Ever wondered how much time and effort it takes to run a small, young food blog? I show you how it’s all done in this 100th post SWR special.

99 problems but this blog ain’t one

This is the 100th post on Served With Rice! It didn’t seem too long ago that I was stuck in bed looking up web hosting options (read the origin story in the very first SWR Annual Report). But here we are, 100 posts and almost 2 years later, and still chugging along.

In celebration, I want to do something different. So I thought, why not tell you all about how all these recipe posts are made? You see, when a rice cooker and a nonstick skillet loves each other very much …

Recipe development and meal planning – most waking moments

These are often one and the same. Sometimes I’m trying to solve a specific problem, like how to use up a particular leftover ingredient. At other times, I’m half-dreaming, half-brainstorming about meal prep while barely awake on my morning commute (don’t we all?).

Having consumed food and cooking related media for most of my life, and having meal prepped for all of my adult life, I usually have a pretty good idea of the general direction the recipe is going to go. With that in mind, I’ll go do some research.

Maybe my idea is close to something I’ve read about somewhere, or seen before on a youtube video, in which case I’ll start there. Otherwise, I go on Google and see if anyone else has anything to say about what I have on my mind.

Since it unexpectedly blew up during the Easter weekend, let’s use my Cod with a Mayo and Old Bay crust as an example to show you how my process is like. I had it in mind to eat more fish, and I remembered seeing cod going for a reasonable price at the supermarket. So I wondered if I could an oven-based meal prep, with maybe a mixed herb and butter sort of situation. What does Google have for me?

Ooh, BBC Good Food has something to say. They’re usually a good starting point, in my opinion. Looks alright at first glance, there’s that baking sheet in the feature image and everything. Let’s look closer and … 

… dang. They sear the fish before baking it, which means more dishes to do. That’s more trouble than it’s worth. Time to move on.

Now this seems close. The use of Old Bay catches my eye, because I brought some of it back with me after my great American adventure and I want to use it before the humidity gets to it. I also like how the fiery red colour of the spice mix gives the fish some colour.

Hmm, speaking of colour, the cod in their picture does look kind of bland and uninteresting. I wonder if there’s a way to brown fish in an oven?

Several food blogs take this approach, and I can see why. The breadcrumb topping solves the browning problem very handily, but while it’s a great technique for a special occasion it feels like too much work for a weeknight. I want a recipe where I can just shove some fish into an oven, and it comes out looking gorgeous, is that too much to ask? (You see how laziness and entitlement is frequently the motivation behind my culinary escapades.)

Time to step back and think for a bit. I remember reading about how mayo helps with browning meats, back when I did research for the mayo marinated Tangy Garlicky Chicken. Does anyone do that with fish? Let’s see what comes up when I search for grilled fish and mayo.

There we go. Just as I remembered, there’s some cool science behind using mayo as a glaze. It sticks to the meat, and the sugars in it contribute to Maillard browning. Sounds great! That’s exactly what I need. Let’s keep the cod and oven part of the meal planning, but pivot from mixed herb and butter to Old Bay and mayo and see what happens.

Cooking and Prep – 2 hours a week

There wasn’t much preparing to do in this case, which is a big part of the appeal. I went into the grocery store knowing exactly what I wanted, and came out with the fish. I went to the market next, and got the vegetables. This is how I like to shop: planned, precise and purposeful.

The fish went into the refrigerator to defrost overnight, and I let some red rice soak in the rice cooker as I went out the next day – red rice is nice for colour and fiber, but they need the head start so they aren’t still raw by the time the white rice is done.

Then, it’s a matter of executing the plan while taking pictures as I go. I could try and plan the shots before I cook, but I can never bother. So I photograph everything that might seem important, and worry about piecing the story together later.

The shooting used to happen with an ancient first generation iPhone SE, but I recently made the upgrade to an iPhone 15 pro. The fancy phone’s camera is a bit more sharp, it adjusts focus better and there’s more bokkeh but that’s all I can tell. The difference is there, but I won’t say that it’s night and day. Still, I don’t regret the upgrade since the old one’s falling apart after 9 years of daily use.

Writing Up – 2 hours a week

I don’t drive. As a consequence, I have about 30 minutes each day on the commute back home where I am both free, yet unable to do anything else useful because I’m stuck on the train. Most of the writing happens in a Google Doc with my iPad.

It works out pretty well. The preamble and ingredients come to mind easily, and I write the instructions while looking at the photos. The abstract and tagline is usually the hardest part, and I leave them for last. The week’s post and newsletter is usually 90% written by Wednesday.

It’s then a simple matter to copy and paste from the Google doc to my new post template on WordPress, and any hyperlinks carry over automatically. Photos also transfer smoothly, but I like to upload to WordPress media directly from my phone. I also keep a backup of the photos on my computer, just in case.

I publish on Thursdays, whenever I can. Some finishing touches have to be made on the PC, like adjusting image sizes. Others are just as easily done on the tablet, like adding tags and categories, fiddling around with the headline and editing the url slug.

I get home, give everything a once-over on my 2020 MacBook Pro and hit publish. Once the post is online, I go and send the newsletter. The newsletter right now is just a manual list of emails I receive from the signup box, because the slow trickle that comes in is quite manageable and it isn’t worth setting up an automated system yet.

Getting more content for the same amount of work

I try to show my meal preps in their entirety to let people know how things fit together. For example, I had the Korean Fried Chicken with a cucumber salad so I included it in the same post because I thought it was a good pairing and I think it’s a good idea to construct a meal that way.

Sometimes, it’s not too important what the recipe is paired with. For example, I make a point of showing the fact that I have vegetables with every meal. What that vegetable is doesn’t matter very much, and by the same token it doesn’t matter which protein gets paired with which vegetable. So even though I had my Korean Fried Chicken with Hairy Cucumber with Glass Noodles and Dried Shrimp, I split them up into two different posts.

Sometimes, I run several meal preps back to back. Maybe they share the same ingredients, or share a common cooking process. Times like these let me really get a lot of content out of a single afternoon, like how I use the same pot of water to blanche edamame for freezer snacks, okra for Okra Ohitashi and spinach for this Chilled Spinach Salad.

It takes a bit of effort later on to un-jumble the pictures from the multiple parallel recipes I have going on, but it sure beats cooking three times a week. Because, for all the meal prepping I do and despite running a freaking food blog, I only enjoy cooking a tiny bit more than I dislike the hassle of trying to figure out how to eat well without having a bunch of meals ready to go. It’s a delicate balance.

Site development – 1 hour a month

I tell myself to do site development on weekends and vacations, but life has a way of getting in between me and a few hours of quiet. But once in a blue moon, I sit down in front of my MacBook and do things like reorganising the categories and restructuring my posts.

For example, I’m looking at this great big category menu on the homepage and it seems like it’s taller than it has to be. A lot of the categories can be combined to make it a more compact experience. Like, do I really have so many Filipino recipes that they justify their own tag? Not really, or at least not yet.

Fortunately, it’s not too hard to mess around on the back end on the wordpress admin site. For example, I want to squish the Japanese and Korean categories together. So I just hit ‘Quick Edit’ and change the category name for one of them.

Then I go and pick out the recipes in the soon-to-be redundant category and switch them over to the new one. Again, the Quick Edit function comes in clutch.

And now the old category can go.

I did this again for all the Southeast Asian recipes, and I combined the Snacks and the Sides. But then, having reduced the menu by 3, I couldn’t resist creating another one for Calorie Conscious recipes that I’ve been cooking through during this fat loss phase I’m going through. Mostly for my own reference, because when it comes time to cut again I can just hit this button and go back to all my fat loss friendly meal preps for ideas.

Now let’s have a look at the new category menu …

Hmm. Seems like I didn’t make a big difference. The bigger issue is that I don’t have a consistent policy for what is a category and what is a tag. Maybe I can do better if I move some of the categories over to being tags instead, like Desserts and Drinks. But I’m too tired to do anymore now, so let’s call it a day.

Self-advertising and publicity – 2 hours a month

The weekends are also when I intend to advertise the blog, such as by being active on social media or reaching out to other bloggers to discuss collaborations. This also rarely happens, and often the best I can do is schedule some posts so my Pinterest and Instagram/Facebook profiles don’t fall too far behind on new recipes.

Here we are in my Meta business suite where I can schedule posts for Instagram and Facebook at once. There’s also a handy function where I can directly post to up to 3 Facebook groups at the same time – but be careful, always check each group’s rules and make sure you follow them. I keep a list of the groups I’m in and the specific formats they request. It’s both common courtesy, and good practice for maximising the chances that the admins will approve your post.

Same deal with Pinterest. You can set up everything and have posts publish later. Although in my experience, Pinterest is a bit more finicky with what they push to the top of people’s feeds (or it just asks for more effort on my part, and my super laid back style of running this blog isn’t enough to catch their algorithm’s attention).

I keep telling myself that I also need to find some extra time to write some ebooks. I see how it’s common to use a free ebook to tempt a reader into joining the newsletter, and I wanna be like the big boy blogs. In all seriousness though, after cooking and running this site for so long I am starting to feel that I have something unique and value-adding to say. Perhaps a 1-page cheat sheet for variations on meal prepped chicken and rice, since that’s what half the blog seems to be.

I have exciting things planned, all I need is the time to implement them. So as (I think) they say in the business world, watch this space! 

Conclusion

That wraps up the behind-the-scenes tour of the SWR production process – 2 hours of cooking and prep, 2 hours of writing up, and an almost nonexistent time budget for site development all backed up by incessant daydreaming and brainstorming.

I hope this was an interesting read for you. If you want to read more about the nuts and bolts of this blog, make sure to check out mt first annual report as well!

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