About
About Recipes and Things
Who cooks and writes here, why every recipe is sized for two, how the food and circulation section is checked, and how this site earns money.
By Wes Hadley · · Updated
Recipes and Things is a cooking site for two people. I write it, cook everything on it, and answer the email that comes in. This page explains who I am, how the recipes get made, how the health section is held to a stricter standard, and where the money comes from.
Who cooks here
My name is Wes Hadley. I spent a good stretch of years on the line in restaurant kitchens, mostly on sauté and grill, with some time on prep and breakfast service. It was not glamorous work. It taught me to set up before I start, to taste as I go, to keep a clean station, and to cook the same dish the same way on a slow Tuesday and a packed Saturday.
These days I cook at home in a small San Francisco apartment kitchen: a four-burner stove, an oven that runs a little hot, not much counter, and one good cast iron skillet that does most of the work. The habits from the line came with me. The volume did not.
Why everything is for two
Most recipes are written for four or six, and halving them is not always simple. Eggs do not divide neatly, pans that are too big burn thin sauces, and baking times shift. So every recipe here starts at two servings and is tested at that size. If something only works in a bigger batch, I say so and tell you what to do with the leftovers.
The domain used to belong to an older recipe and food-review blog. The new edition started on , and everything published since then is cooking for two.
How recipes are tested
- Everything is cooked in the same small kitchen described above, on ordinary home equipment.
- Ingredients are weighed on a kitchen scale, and I give weights alongside cups and spoons where it matters.
- Each recipe is cooked at least twice before it goes up, and the second time I follow only what I wrote down.
- When something fails, I note it in the recipe: what went wrong, why I think it happened, and how to avoid it.
If a recipe does not work for you, I want to know. Tell me what pan and oven you used and anything you swapped, and I will try to figure it out.
Eating for Circulation
Eating for Circulation is a section about food and blood flow, written with adult men in mind. Health writing about food is easy to get wrong, so it follows rules the rest of the site does not need. You can start with the overview, Food and blood flow.
Before anything in that section is published, I check it against this list:
- Every health claim is traced to a source, and the source is listed on the page.
- Every claim is labeled for how strong the evidence is, so you can tell a well-studied effect from a small or early finding.
- No recipe is presented as treating, curing or preventing anything. Food is food.
- Where the evidence is weak or mixed, the page says so plainly.
- Readers are pointed to their own doctor for anything about their health.
For an example of how this works in practice, see the beet and cocoa claims, checked, where several popular claims are looked at one by one.
How this site earns money
There is no paywall, no sign-up and no newsletter. The site pays for itself in two ways.
First, affiliate links. Some links to equipment or ingredients earn a small commission if you buy something through them. It does not change the price you pay, and I only link to things I would use myself.
Second, paid pages. Occasionally a page is paid for by an advertiser. Those pages are always marked Advertisement at the top, with a disclosure box that says who paid. The four foods every day is one example of a page marked that way.
Editorial pages, including every recipe and everything in Eating for Circulation that is not marked Advertisement, are not paid for. No advertiser sees them before they are published or has a say in what they contain.
Corrections
When I get something wrong, I fix it and note the change on the page and in the corrections log, with the date and what changed. I do not quietly rewrite pages.
Contact
For a recipe that did not work, a correction, a claim you want checked or a business question, the contact page has everything you need. It is one person on the other end, so give me a few days.