I shared a US written recipe to a friend in Sweden and realized that I did so without thinking. They, more than likely, use the metric system and the US system uses something else entirely. When I lived in Germany, I dealt with this every day. After two years of living there, I started to think of my recipes in terms of kilos, grams, liters, and milliliters and it took me a while to get used to the US system again after moving back.

Making conversions became so natural, I stopped thinking about it. I tried to explain it but realized that there had to be an easier way.  So there are a few ways you can go about making the conversions. The first, is to commit all the measurement conversions to memory. For example, 30 grams is roughly 1 ounce and 250 ml is roughly 1 liquid cup.

If that’s too cumbersome or math frustrates you, you can try using a conversion calculator such as this one which I found on the Southern Food site at About.com. Since I was confronted with the need to make the conversions nearly every day, I found it easier to commit everything to memory.

Another great tip is to use a scale such as the one pictured here . This one has both kilograms and pounds so you can make the accurate conversion automatically. I use this method sometimes as I have a good scale on hand.