How much do you weigh?

In writing all my ideas down in a list for future blogs and recipe ideas I have discovered a problem that I had not occurred to me before;

How do I wright down the weights and measurements for my recipes?

My Mother and my Grandma taught my how to cook from a very young age. One of my earliest memories with my Grandma is standing on the wooden step in her kitchen watching her make her incredible rhubarb and ginger jam whilst I also stuck the labels onto the awaiting jars. With my mother it has to be using her old brass scales and iron weights to weigh out the butter, sugar and flour for the sponge butterfly cakes we were going to make. In both these instances they and I would ALWAYS weigh in pounds and ounces (or old money as we call it) and to me it made perfect sense. However, when I started to take an interest in cookery books and learnt about weights and measures at school I was learning the metric system (new money) and using grams which, as that was how school worked, ALSO made perfect sense. 

When the two world started to collide things started to get very confusing, not to mention when I came into contact with the American cup system! 
I remember one day bringing home a list of required ingredients for the following food technology class. I had a problem. Each item was preceded with "200g of this" or "125g of that" in my home we only had the old fashioned but perfectly reliable brass scales (which I still have and still use today) and these only weighed in old money! Not having anything like the internet we had to go scouring through recipe books to find conversion tables, and armed with a calculator we finally were able to get the correct amount of ingredients.

I could always visualise what 1lb of minced beef would look like or how much a pint of milk was but when asked roughly how much 500g of mince or 500mls of milk could be I wouldn't have the faintest idea!... and still find it struggle to this day. But in saying that, for me, it also entirely depends on the ingredient.

Now, when I say I understand the metric, imperial and American cup measurements I do, but depending of what it is I am cooking with or the end product I wish to create depends entirely on what sort of measurements I use. 

So here is a word of caution, when I write my recipes I'll be writing them the ways in which I use them. This will include a mixture of metric and imperial (never mixed within the same recipe), American cups and sometimes I don't even use measurements! Therefore, if they seem a little muddled or unclear I apologise in advance. It's just how I have learnt to do things and I still hope the recipes work for you.

Here is a measurement conversion site if you're like me and still need to convert thing back and forth

Lastly, in answer to my title question "How much do you weigh?" my answer would be this; It entirely depends on the recipe.

Till next time, Steph x

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