Six-second Videos and Other Newsy Tidbits

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

Twitter introduced Vine just over a week ago and at Special Fork, we couldn’t wait to try this truncated video format – limited to just six seconds long! The video is ephemeral; once you post it to Twitter, it’s not readily findable again.

In order to share our Vine videos with you, I’ve captured the original links from Twitter. Since Special Fork is about solving the dinnertime dilemma, we didn’t want to just video six random seconds of cooking or eating. We wanted our Vine posts to be a teachable moment.

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Dim Sum with a Twitter Friend

By Sandy Hu

Joining Twitter is like being the new kid at school. Everyone else already has friends, everyone is chattering away in their little cliques, and you are standing alone on the sidelines, trying to find a way to break in.

You begin to follow people and start commenting – tentatively, at first – looking for common ground. Like any in-person conversation, you try to engage in the conversation going on around you. Someone tweets that they are cooking a certain dish. You tweet back, “How do you make it?” Someone is back from vacation. You ask, “How was your trip?” And you hope these strangers will respond and follow you back.

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Couscous Makes an Easy, Go-To Meal

By Sandy Hu

I’m on Twitter every weekday afternoon as @specialforksndy trying to help people with their most pressing need of the evening: what to cook for dinner. One of my favorite ideas for cooks in a hurry is couscous salad.

Here’s the couscous recipe in a tweet, under the 140 character limit: “Boil 1 ½ c broth; add 1c couscous. Off heat, cover & stand 5 mins. Fluff w/fork; add chick peas+g onions+feta cheese+olives+Ital dressing.”

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What to Serve a New Twitter Friend

By Sandy Hu

What can you learn about a person in 140-character comments over a single day? I learned enough about @Melissa808 to know I wanted to invite her for dinner.

Melissa Chang is a freelance writer and a social media consultant in Honolulu who tweets as @Melissa808. I, as @specialforksndy, met her over tweets just last Thursday, trying to help a friend of a friend with restaurant suggestions for her trip to Hawaii.

Although I was the food editor of the Honolulu Advertiser years ago, I wasn’t very current on the restaurant scene so I tweeted @Kamaka_Hawaii, the only foodie from Hawaii I followed on Twitter, for some advice. She, in turn, involved two people with the pulse on restaurant dining in Hawaii, tweeting back “both @Melissa808 and @thedailydish (Catherin Toth) are big time Foodies, Bloggers, Journalists from Oahu.”

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Tweet to @Specialforksndy: F#*<k no!! that sounds so nasty!!!!

From Sandy Hu

What’s for dinner? Most people – as many as 70 percent, according to one survey – don’t have a clue at 4 p.m.

About that time Twitter comes alive with plaintive cries for help, “girl what u cook?” “im hungry, any ideas for supper??? idk what to cook?” “Ummmm what to cook for dinner? Any ideas tweeps?”

I, @specialforksndy, come to the rescue! It’s not easy to respond with recipe ideas in 140 characters or less.

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