About Weekly Delight

How the recipes are made

The dishes here are well-known ones, and the methods follow how they are widely and traditionally made. The recipe text was compiled and edited for this site with the help of AI writing tools, and every recipe then goes through the automated checks below. Where a recipe is a practical adaptation rather than the traditional version, it names the traditional ingredient or step it replaces.

Three kinds of checking, kept apart

• Automated checks run on every recipe, every time the site is built (below). They catch contradictions and unsupported claims in the text. They do not cook anything.
• Editorial review means a named person has read a recipe against a written checklist. No recipe has been through it yet; when one has, it will say so under its byline, with the reviewer and the date.
• Cooking means a named person made the recipe and recorded what happened: the equipment, the real times, the yield and anything that went wrong. No recipe has a record like that yet. When one does, its page will show who cooked it, when and what they found. About twenty well-known recipes have been chosen to go through both first.

None of the three is implied by the others: a recipe that passes every script has not therefore been cooked, and the site does not describe any recipe as tested unless a cooking record for it exists.

Corrections

Every recipe page has a link to report a problem: a wrong quantity, a step that is unclear, a time that did not work, a yield that was off. A report records which recipe, and which version of it, you were reading. Each one is read and checked against the recipe; if it is right, the recipe is corrected and the date it last changed, shown under the byline, moves. If you leave an email address and ask for a reply, the reply goes to that address. If the report page says reports are not switched on yet, nothing can be sent from it until they are.

What is checked automatically, and what is not

Every rebuild of the site runs a set of scripts over all 5555 recipes, and the build fails until a problem they find is fixed:

• Times are read from the method. A script looks through every step for chilling, proving, marinating and other waiting, and the total time shown on the page includes it. Where the method gives a range (“12 to 24 hours”), the page shows the range.
• Diet labels are compared with the ingredient list. Flour on a gluten-free recipe or honey on a vegan one fails the build. Where a label depends on choosing one ingredient over another, the label says so.
• Nutrition is calculated, and only where it can be. See below.
• Search phrases have to be true of the recipe. “30-minute” is only used when the whole recipe, waiting included, takes thirty minutes or less.
• Every photograph is compared with the dish and its diet label before it is published. Wrong pictures have been withdrawn rather than left up.

None of this proves a recipe is safe for a particular diet or medical condition, and none of it is nutritional or medical advice. If you cook for an allergy or a health condition, check every ingredient yourself. The diet labels are matched against ingredient names by a script: that does not certify a recipe free of an allergen, and a packaged ingredient (stock, a sauce, a cheese) has to be checked on its own label.

How the nutrition figures are worked out

Each recipe's ingredient list is read line by line, every ingredient is matched to a food, its weight is worked out, and the figures are added up and divided by the servings. Of the 714 foods the calculator knows, 483 use the figures of a named entry in USDA FoodData Central (SR Legacy, a public-domain food-composition database) and 6 the nearest named entry where SR Legacy lacks the food itself (plain dry breadcrumbs for panko, for instance); 213 still use figures written for this site that have no recorded source, and 8 are rough stand-ins for an unnamed ingredient such as “spice”. Calories are 4 per gram of protein and carbohydrate, 9 per gram of fat and 7 per gram of alcohol.

Every recipe falls into one of three groups, and the page says which:

• Calculated (3,251 recipes). Every line was read and at most a twentieth of the energy comes from foods without a recorded source. These figures, and only these, go into the page's structured data and decide the High-Protein, Low-Carb and Keto labels.
• Approximate (1,251 recipes). The sum rests on an assumption that moves it, and the page names it: a marinade counted in full, weights that include bone, a tin counted with its liquid, an ingredient with no amount, or foods without a recorded source.
• None given (1,053 recipes). Some lines cannot be read, or the dish is deep-fried and the oil it takes up cannot be known. Rather than print a guess, these pages give no figures.

A calculation is not a laboratory analysis. The food table cannot see a brand's recipe or an additive, a raw weight is not a cooked one, and salt added “to taste” is not counted. Two sets of figures agreeing with each other is not evidence that either matches the dish on your plate.

Where the photographs come from

Of the 5555 recipes, 5,187 have a photograph of the dish, 80 have only an AI illustration, and 288 have no picture yet. Counted as files rather than recipes, there are 5,669 photographs: 5,187 main pictures and 482 in-progress shots.

None of the photographs were taken for this site, and none shows this site's own cooking: each is a third party's photograph of the dish, used under its licence and credited underneath. Of the 5,669, 3,597 come from Wikimedia Commons, 1,732 were found through Openverse, which indexes Flickr and other archives of freely licensed work, and 340 come from Pexels and Pixabay, a stock library with its own licence, which allows commercial use and asks for no credit (it is given anyway). Of the archive photographs, 1,646 are CC0 or public domain, 1,796 are Creative Commons Attribution, and 1887 are Attribution-ShareAlike.

Every image is resized and re-encoded for the web. As site policy, that is treated as an adaptation: the ShareAlike photographs are offered here under the same licence as the original, and the credit line says so. Also as site policy, and not because every such licence would forbid it, NonCommercial images are not used (so that the site stays free to carry advertising) and neither are NoDerivatives ones, so that no question about resizing arises.

And where the illustrations come from

80 recipes carry an illustration generated by an AI image model instead of a photograph, from a prompt written out of the recipe's own description and ingredients. Each is labelled as an AI illustration underneath the picture and in its alt text, listed separately in images-attribution.md, and not counted among the photographs above. It shows what the dish is meant to look like, not a dish anyone cooked. No new illustrations are being added.

The 288 recipes with no picture show a plain coloured card with the dish's name. A wrong picture would be worse than none.

How to use the site

• Adjustable servings. Every ingredient list scales. Press the plus and minus buttons and the quantities recalculate. Cooking times do not, and the page says so; bakes go from half to double and no further, because a tin and a rise do not scale freely.
• Collections and a weekly plan. Short collections for particular jobs, and five dinners for this week with one shopping list you can scale, tick off and print. You can also plan your own week from saved recipes.
• Guides. Short cooking guides on recipe times, rice, tin sizes, substitutions and split sauces, each with its sources.
• Cook Mode. Enlarges the type, hides everything that is not the method, keeps your screen awake and highlights the step you are on. Arrow keys move between steps.
• Inline timers. Where a step has a duration, there is a button to start a timer for it. It will chime and buzz when it finishes.
• Saved recipes. The heart icon saves anything to your favourites, stored in your browser. No account, no email.
• Print properly. The print button produces a clean recipe card with no navigation and no advertisements.

Attribution and licensing

Each photograph is credited underneath itself on the recipe page, with the photographer, the licence and a link back to the original file, and each generated illustration says underneath itself that it is one. The complete list in one place is images-attribution.md. If you would like to reproduce a recipe, please link back rather than copying wholesale.