Fried fish? Not really. This dish was a real surprise for us and worth a try!

Interesting tidbit: a top search item on Google yesterday was burrito. We’ve seen research that says consumers prefer the Internet for recipe search to any other medium. This seems to back that up .. along with “hangover” being a top search as well!

The rub here is that we believe people want to search for recipes online, but they want to find and collect them even more more. Makes sense to me. That’s why I have piles of clippings of recipes in a box. In the ad-driven online world, the relationship ends with a consumer finding what they are looking for. It puts recipes sites and consumers at odds: sites make money off of multiple searches; consumers want to find the perfect recipes as soon as possible. Seems backwards. Consumers want to find recipes and save them, maybe even modify them to their taste. That’s what Key Ingredient is all about.

How do we stay in business? We add value. The next step in having a recipe collection is sharing it. We can help with our widget and on-demand custom cookbooks. Cookbooks are the perfect gift and our widget can earn bloggers addition money from embedded advertising (still in the works). With Key Ingredient finding a recipe is the beginning of a relationship, not the end. That makes more sense to us as a company and as customers.

Well all great things start small, and this great thing has been a long time coming! Below is our recipe widget that we have been working on for quite some time. Why use it? Well, it turns a recipe from simple unstructured text into a nicely formatted object. This allows a reader to save your recipe into their collection, email it to a friend or print a nicely formatted page. In addition, saving it will keep a permanent link to the original blog post that they got it from, even if they modify the recipe to their own tastes. It creates a legacy of credit that is nice for everyone.

The widget also will update any changes that you make to the recipe on Key Ingredient. We are really excited about this new tool and look forward to getting bloggers to give it a spin!

A couple of caveats:

>The recipe embed code (a button to the right of the recipe marked Blog This) has to be added in Wordpress with the visual editor shut off. Don’t really know why, but this is the same issue in Wordpress for embedding YouTube videos.

>I’ve added some styling before the embed code to push the widget off of the left edge of the blog. I added <p style=”margin-left:100px> before the embed code and a </p> after it. This styling pushes the widget to the right of your blog posting area by 100 pixels. You can move it further right by increasing the value and to the left by decreasing it. With no styling, the widget will appear flush left.

More soon and looking for feedback!

Why have there been no posts recently? Well, two reasons primarily. First, I rented an office that was a sublease. No revelation there, but there was a catch: the other tenants were architects and designers **who enforced a code of silence! No joke. I took one phone call and got a warning. After sitting in my car for two weeks, I decided I needed to move. And fortunately I found a nice office in the same cool office park. Artists, recording studios, Gibson guitar showroom. Cool.

But I said two reasons. The second is Yelp. Yelp is addicting because it is about places you know. And for me that means writing about restaurants. So I have been Yelping a good deal. And that has sapped some of my blogging mojo.

At the same time, I have been assembling our start-up quarters. As I was huffing in the toxic fumes of freshly made folding tables (from China), it got me to thinking that I need to create a checklist of things for you to buy for your startup (should you venture down that path). So I will do so shortly, and include some of my witty repartee that makes my writing so poorly structured. My writing is like one of those hidden pictures: if you read it out loud you can almost hear me saying it. And somehow it works! It’s how I speak normally, and you’ll see what I mean when I finally get those demo videos (remember that?) online.

Suffice it to say, none were produced in the “cone of silence”, but stay tuned!