Baking has always been enjoyable to me. Hearing people say, “There’s a party in my mouth!” is a tremendous feeling of accomplishment. Having a baking blog to share my recipes has been fun, although I’m really just getting started. My first blog started years ago as a way for me to show my mother, who lives about 800 miles away, the cakes I made for my kids’ birthdays. My decorating skills have improved over the years, and I’ve had people hire me to bake for them in recent months. I don’t really have the time it takes to manage a baking business, so I thought that sharing my recipes and tips would help other moms out when they need a great cake. In this economy, not everyone can afford gourmet bakery cakes that look like they were inspired by the Cake Boss, but maybe with my help, they can gain confidence in doing it themselves. I hope my blog will inspire people to give baking a try or take it to the next level. I’m not a pro by any means, but I would love to share my best recipes with anyone who wants them.

In order to share my recipes, I was looking for a way to let readers print the recipes without having to print the whole blog post. After running into a few glitches with some other programs, I found Kitchen Monki. Once I found Kitchen Monki, getting started was as simple as putting 2 lines of code into my blog. Not only does Kitchen Monki allow readers to print out a nice, organized sheet of paper with a recipe on it, it offers an incredible way to plan, organize, search, and share with the KM community. My readers can stay right on my blog page for my recipes, or they can click over to the main KM website and find endless recipes for their menus. I can hardly wait for my blog to pick up some more traffic so I can realize the immense potential the Kitchen Monki White Label holds.

The people of Kitchen Monki have been incredibly professional and kind as I’ve been getting things going. I hope I can make them proud that my blog ia a part of their community.

Jody
Red Mixer Bakery

I wish I could take some credit for some of the early premises in founding Kitchen Monki and its product platform. Instead, I talk about it to publishers nearly every day. When Sam and the founding team looked out on the market, one thing they noted is how traditional content management systems (CMS) that publishers use are really a poor fit for recipe and food content.


If you are a news site like our white label partners at King5 or a blogger (ie a “WordPress publisher”) jamming out recipes in a Kitchen Monki-enabled food community like Red Mixer Bakery, you likely have run into the constraints of your CMS. The history of CMS tells the tale. They were created first and foremost for television and newspaper sites. What is critical content on news sites like these? Whatever is new and timely – the big accident that disrupted the morning commute, a big storm coming in, local elections. The value of this content almost by definition degrades rapidly with time.


Kitchen Monki White Label for publishers was created specifically for food and recipe content, which has very different characteristics than news. In your white label food community, the most viewed recipe might be that Christmas prime rib from 3 years ago, or the turkey gravy from a post last Thanksgiving. Folks want to find these recipes easily and fast, and the age of the content is irrelevant. Or they may want to find a recipe using certain spices, or recipes with an Ethiopian theme for a party, or that takes less than 30 minutes to prepare, or that are low in saturated fat, or … you get the idea.


Check out how Kitchen Monki White Label will make your recipe content much more searchable and relevant through a simple but structured recipe taxonomy for each recipe you post, optimized for recipe search. Why does it matter for a publisher? More useful and findable recipes means more pageviews and hence more advertising revenue. Hopefully that soothes your stomach.


Rob Eleveld
Director of Monki Business

EAT from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

1. Watch a guy eat around the world in 1 minute (via Eater)
2. 5 sure-fire ways to cut the grocery bill (via USA today)
3. Top 15 Foods for cleansing your body (via Care2)
4. Make and Eat: Cajun Pork Chops with Spicy Beansrecipe
5. How to butter Popcorn with a Straw (via chicago gluttons)

We created Kitchen Monki to help the ordinary cook take control of their food lives, plain and simple. Many of you have taken advantage of the organizational power of the site to house your recipe collections and we think that’s really cool. No doubt, you’ve realized that once a recipe of yours is in the system, all of the site’s tools are at your disposal such as drag-and-drop meal planning, recipe sharing, and mobile grocery lists.

But on a higher level, you probably don’t realize that Kitchen Monki can help save you money, particularly when you go to the grocery store. As said by Top Banana Sam Kinney: “Everybody needs to find a way to save money. What we do is help consumers go into the store armed with a plan.”

Check out this Special Consumer Report from WPXI Channel 11 News in Pittsburgh with accompanying video and see for yourself!

1. Top 10 tips for Grilling Season (via Serious Eats)
2. 7 Ways to beat Allergies Naturally (via Care2)
3. Top Chef: The Musical? (via Slashfood)
4. Make and Eat: Margarita Cupcakes Recipe
5. 7 Ways to avoid gas from beans (via Care2)

1. Baskin Robbins 31 cent scoops coming April 27th (via Eater)
2. The Cologne that smells like Bacon (via Eater)
3. 6 Kitchen Safety Myths that could make you sick (via Care2)
4. Heavy Beer Drinking may increase risk of Stomach Cancer (via USN)
5. Make and Eat: Spinach Lasagna Recipe

1. How to get 25 packets of free Organic Seeds (via MNN)
2. The truth about Health Drinks (via Guardian)
3. And the winner of Top Chef Allstars is….. (via Eater)
4. Make and Eat: Lentil, Barley and Bean Chili Recipe
5. How to increase Omega-3′s in your diet (via Care2)

1. 5 Foods that Sabotage your Sleep (via Care2)
2. Vinegar is a chef’s secret weapon (via WSJ)
3. 5 Essential Vegan and Vegetarian Cookbooks (via Care2)
4. Stephen Colbert on how to profit from worldwide food shortages (via Eater)
5. Make and Eat: Chicken Paprikash Recipe

We’ve been amazed at the number of people that have been using Kitchen Monki as their recipe solution. Undoubtedly, users have seen the value that the site brings to the table when it comes to making recipes do more than just be read. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve put some elbow grease into making an upgrade of the Recipe Adder. We want your recipes to do the work for you especially, for example, when it comes to making accurate aggregated grocery lists.

A few things that you’ll see in the new version of the Recipe Adder are:

• Validation of capital and lower case letters
• Alerts regarding ingredients that are categorized as ‘Assigned and Unassigned’ to a step during recipe ‘Directions’
• Recipes won’t publish if unassigned ingredients remain
• Easier and Faster editing of Ingredients

Here are a few looks at what to expect:

Recipe Editing will now be performed inline.  Standard Ingredient suggestions will now be given with the ability to page through additional choices.

During Editing of a Custom Ingredient, users may search for a replacement by clicking ‘Find standard alternative’.  Preprep suggestions will be offered.

During Ingredients Editing, alerts will show up if you’ve forgotten to include quantities or measures of ingredients.

Custom Ingredients (ingredients not in the database) are colored orange whereas standard ingredients are black.  Users will be able to see a running tally of these ingredients throughout.

Notification of ingredient stats (ie. Custom vs standard ingredients) also appear in other steps of the recipe creation process.  You may go back to edit these at any time.

Users now have control of how ingredients are ordered.

Kitchen Monki’s recipes are data driven and when these recipes are validated, in banded format, and coupled with the toolbar, they make the most powerful recipe solution on the web.  Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.  And thanks as always for using Kitchen Monki!