Badly Written Recipes

I Hate

Three pieces of ginger - how big is a piece exactly?

I recently got a recipe from my big sis for gingerbread cake.

She’d made it for us when we went up to visit her and it was so deliscious I wanted the recipe so I could make it when I got home. She scanned the recipe from book and emailed it to me. I printed it out and set off to the kitchen to get the ingredients ready. One of the igredients mentioned on the list was ‘three pieces of ginger’. I really hate this about recipe books - how big is a piece of ginger exactly? It’s like the saying ‘how long is a piece of string’?

You get this a lot in recipe books - and common annoyances are:

- a handful of
- a bunch of
- a few pieces of

What’s wrong with good old measurements so that I don’t have to guess and worry that I’m wasting my time even bunging the thing in the oven as I haven’t got the proportions correct?