Category — Site News

Every so often, I’ll meet someone new and mention that I have this site, and they’ll ask me what I write about. No matter how many times this happens, I always find myself awkwardly reaching for an answer, unable to encapsulate a response into a neat sound bite, and I ultimately end up rattling off a laundry list of things that I don’t write about instead. Reading this account of the demise of a food blog in Buffalo, New York made me think long and hard about how I view myself as a writer, and how I want others to view me.

Since the inception of The Best Food Blog Ever, I’ve always regarded myself as a food writer. In that singular declaration, though, are a lot of presumptions that need to be dismissed. For one thing, I’m not a food or restaurant critic. I’ve never felt that it was my place to decree that anyone that happens to find themselves reading my material should be obligated to like and dislike the same things that I do. Words have power, and words that you publish on the Internet have enduring power.

If a restaurant has a bad night, with an unfamiliar face filling in for a sick chef, or a large party that lingers, causing booked reservations to pile up in the foyer, or for any one of a million unknown factors, I’m not going to memorialize the displeasure of that evening in an entry. On the other hand, if I have a fantastic experience, one that goes beyond all of the expectations that I had when I laid my hand on the front door, sure, I’ll write about it. In the realm of restaurant cuisine, it’s far more likely that an establishment has the occasional off night than to have a consistently bad place that occasionally gets it right. Restaurant critique is best left to the professionals, whose livelihood depends on being able to weigh the quality of a dining experience in as objective a fashion as possible. For most of us on the web, without formal training, this isn’t possible. There are too many bloggers, and I’m including everyone on Yelp, who believe themselves to be the next Ruth Reichl, Frank Bruni, or Craig LaBan.

I also don’t publish recipes on any regular basis, and in saying that, it’s not my intent to knock those sites that do. One of the reasons why food blogging is so popular is that, if you’re focused on recipes, you can count on being able to generate at least one new recipe per week, and likely many more. In the early days of The Best Food Blog Ever, I dabbled in recipe design, and almost immediately felt suffocated by the limitations of that writing model.

In my mind, recipe writing and food writing are different animals. There is a scientific, methodical approach to recipe writing, and while you may have endured many long hours experimenting with different ingredients in shape, form, and quantity, ultimately your end product consists of a list of components, followed by numbered steps telling folks what to do with them. Finish it up, take a good photo, then post it. This is not to say that I’ll never write another recipe ever again, but unless I have a dish that’s truly inspired, it’s just not anywhere near the top of my list. There’s got to be a story that drives the recipe in order for me to consider posting it. I was asked to submit a recipe that will be published in a compendium later this year, and, to be honest, I enjoyed writing the headnote the most.

With all of that said, sometimes writing for The Best Food Blog Ever is the hardest thing to do, and also the most rewarding. Once you’ve eliminated restaurant reviews and recipes from the regular rotation, the universe of possibilities shrinks to a small solar system of prospective topics. From time to time, a particularly inspirational story just lands in your lap.

One of the phrases that stuck with me, when I read the writer’s final entry on Buffalo Chow, was that “our system here…is too broken for me to fix it”. This, after enduring a meal at the Olive Garden and venting about the decline of the quality of restaurants in the Buffalo area, and of suspiciously biased reviews of establishments by the local papers. In the end, it seems that the blog died because, as a site focused on restaurant reviews, there was nothing left to write about.

I’ll admit it, I eat at the Olive Garden. I’ve also eaten at Taillevent. And in between the Olive Garden, with its vibrating, flashing pagers and Taillevent, where your bottle of wine is poured over a candle flame so as to avoid getting sediment in your glass, I will eat and write about an entire universe of food, if there’s a story to tell. I won’t tell you about the Olive Garden, because you and everyone else knows about the Olive Garden. Personally, I don’t find the food to be particularly epic or offensive, but the prices are decent, they have a great kid’s menu, and the atmosphere is loud enough to mask the sounds of a fussy baby. Now, if you’re going to the Olive Garden exclusively for the food, and you don’t have a baby with you, your own personal experience is going to lack two of the three important factors that appeal to me. But my experience is going to be different from yours, obviously. As a new parent, I enjoy the Olive Garden much more than I would have before the baby came along.

Is it my responsibility, as a food writer, to “rescue” people from dining experiences that don’t meet up to my own personal standards for quality, value, or foodworthiness? Did the Olive Garden suddenly become a much better restaurant once I became a parent? Of course not. Our lives, perceptions, and priorities are in a constant state of change and evolution, and it just so happens that we’ve become part of the demographic that the Olive Garden has designed its restaurants to attract. 21 months ago, we weren’t in that demographic. Today, we are.

The world of food writing is large enough to accommodate all of us, whether we choose to embrace the comforting uniformity of chain restaurants or elect to be the first reservation on opening night of the latest Farm to Table to Fork to Mouth to Gut bistro. No matter where you fall in the spectrum, it is my ambition to offer you the best writing that you can find on the web. Writing that happens to be about food, at least most of the time.

Somewhere on the western outskirts of Philadelphia, in the living room of the well-appointed home of a stranger, I find myself sitting on a couch with renowned New York Times food columnist Amanda Hesser.  Nursing a pleasant buzz from a hearty quaff of Victory Brewing Company’s Festbier, we’re discussing the benefits and disadvantages of no less than three different Twitter clients that I have installed on my iPhone.  Nearby, a dining table creaks under the weight of pimento cheese, venison stew, stuffed mushrooms, cold sesame noodles, and a myriad of other delectable, homemade dishes.

How did I get here?

The story begins six years ago, with Hesser putting out a call for readers to submit their most beloved recipes from the pages of The New York Times.  Six thousand responses later, and after years of culling, testing, and refining, Amanda Hesser has debuted The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century, a collection of nearly 1,000 dishes spanning a culinary epoch that began in the 1850s and ends with me standing over a food processor last Tuesday night, making pimento cheese.

To celebrate the release of the book, a call to arms was heard throughout the City of Brotherly Love, beckoning food bloggers to a potluck, hosted by the author herself, Audra Wolf of Doris and Jilly Cook, and Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars, with libations to be provided by Victory Brewing Company.  “Food bloggers!”, I said to myself as I read the invitation, “I are one!”  And so a plan was hatched to attend the fete.  But first, I had to decide what to bring.  And before that, I needed to get my hands on a copy of the book.

Thanks to living in the future, Amazon was able to drop a copy of The Essential New York Times Cookbook on my porch the very next day.  I hefted the 4.6 pound work onto my coffee table and started flipping, making mental notes, poring over interesting recipes, and flipping some more until I reached the index.  The first impression that one gets from the book is how strikingly organized it is, for such an extensive collection of recipes.  Yes, we have grown accustomed to expecting chapter headings leading us to soups, salads, poultry and game, fish and shellfish – but what surprises and delights the harried cook is the breakdown, for example, of the soup chapter into listings for cold soups, vegetable soups, soups for each season, even soups for 8 and soups for 2.

I decided to make two easy dishes that would survive the trek in below-freezing temperatures to University City.  Pimento cheese was a natural choice, seeing that I had used other recipes to make it many times before, and could easily adapt to a different preparation.  The other dish, Take-Out Style Sesame Noodles, was selected partly due to its ease of preparation and partly due to my ongoing quest to find the perfect cold sesame noodle recipe (hint – the search is over).

On Wednesday evening, our GPS guided us to a row of darkened homes on a short street that was made to appear even narrower by the fact that the houses sat above us, with imposing brick and concrete stairs arching upwards at a sharp angle.  We made our way to the house number that was designated on the invitation, rang the doorbell, and basked in the warm glow of incandescent lighting as Audra Wolfe answered the door and invited us into her home.

Once inside, I set the dishes on the table and made a point of making nametags – not for myself and my wife, but for the dishes – “Hi, my name is Pimento Cheese.”  With that duty discharged, I scribbled my name and site name in sharpie and proceeded to mess up my “look” with an inartfully placed adhesive rectangle over my heart.  I made small talk with the other invitees and started grazing, taking small samples of everything.  Over the course of the next few minutes, more folks arrived and the table started filling up, with the statistically improbable outcome of my pimento cheese meeting up with two of its twins.  At least my sesame noodles stood alone in their spicy, peanut-y goodness.

Amanda Hesser, as it turns out, is far more approachable than I had ever anticipated, which is not to say that I expected her to be mean or anything like that – she’s just an incredibly friendly and open person.  Someone who, despite her extensive list of accomplishments, still retains the humility to write her name out on a name tag at a party featuring her own book.  We found each other hovering over the three bowls of pimento cheese, and started chatting amiably like soccer moms in the produce department of a grocery store.

At one point, I asked her if she had ever had the opportunity to try any of the offerings from Victory Brewing Company (a local favorite which, coincidentally, is ten minutes away from my house) and, when she said no, I took that opportunity to introduce her to one of my favorite beers, Festbier, a lovely Oktoberfest-style lager that uses all German malts and whole flower European hops.  With the bottles of Festbier being in the shortest supply out of all of the varieties, we were lucky enough to snag two of the last bottles.  While we were at it, she also had the good fortune to try a sample of the Bee Sting Ale, the homebrewed creation of our friends Melissa and Ray of Bathtub Brewery.  And there we all were, my wife and I, Melissa and Ray, Dave Speers from Victory Brewing Company, and Amanda Hesser – drinking beers, crammed into the narrow hallway next to the staircase.  It felt like college again, but with more flavors of awesome than the human mind can even begin to imagine.  And without classes to attend the next day.

As the party wound down, I was glad to see that all of the sesame noodles were consumed, saving me the trouble of hauling the leftovers back home.  We rendered the last of the pimento cheese onto a paper plate, and my wife was kind enough to give the bowls a quick wash.  We bid goodbye to Amanda, Audrey, Marisa, and all of our friends both new and old, and scurried off into the dark of night, just a bit warmer than when we had arrived.

They say time flies when you’re having fun.  Guess what?  Time flies even faster when you’re trying to prep for a rapidly approaching cooking demo in front of an audience of 150 people.

I had reached the stage at the New York Botanical Garden with an hour and fifteen minutes before the start of my first demo at 1pm.  In order to pull off a successful show, I’d have to start the demonstration having already prepared batches of roasted garlic and caramelized onion, as well as a finished, or nearly finished, pan of caramelized onion bread pudding.  The roasted garlic component would require, at minimum, 45 minutes in the oven, while the onions would need a good 20 minutes on the stove.  The bread pudding needed to bake for 40 minutes, if not more.  With all of this in mind, the timing of the prep and assembly would be critical.

Here’s what I learned from doing this demo – the relative organization of the portion of the stage that is visible to the audience is not an indicator of what’s happening behind the scenes.  The New York Botanical Garden was nice enough to set up large fans to keep the air flowing under the tent, but every time I peeled a clove of garlic, the airflow would blow the loose skins up into the air like ticker tape.  I would take my knife, bash the clove, peel off the skin, and it would float onto the floor – but I was in too much of a hurry to stop.  Eventually, the carpeted floor behind the counter was filled with skins, swirling about as if I had stepped into a garlicky snowglobe.

The whirlwind of activity on the stage soon attracted curious onlookers, who filed into the seating area to watch.  Some of them even started taking photos and video. The New York Botanical Garden had provided me with an assistant, which was a total blessing – he assumed the task of peeling the garlic cloves while I separated them.  By noon, I had unpeeled cloves of garlic roasting in the oven, and five cups of onions sauteing on the stove.  By 12:30, I had assembled the bread pudding and put it into the oven.  I was in as good a shape as I had ever hoped to be.

I had just enough time to run to the restroom, returning to the stage with only a minute to spare.  In just that brief period, the number of occupied seats had ballooned – it wasn’t a full house, but the open-air environment allowed for a far greater number of audience members than an indoor stage in a department store.  The emcee announced my name, the name of my site, and I started my presentation.

The next 45 minutes flew by, thankfully with minimal hiccups.  I was able to demonstrate the use of a mandoline to breeze through the slicing of an onion in ten seconds, showed the audience the sauteing of the onions, followed by a quick cut to the pot of caramelized onions that were ready for their close-up.  I showed how to dress unpeeled garlic cloves for roasting (salt, pepper, olive oil) and popped those into the oven, whereupon I magically removed the packet of roasted garlic that I had strategically started cooking at noon.  The same process produced the reveal for the caramelized onion bread pudding, a proud moment that saw me lift a casserole high into the air, with the requisite oohs and ahhs from the crowd.

What was most surprising, though, was the level of interest and enthusiasm during the Q&A session that followed.  People were genuinely intrigued by the recipes, the same recipes that I had become almost numb to during recipe testing and evaluation.  I asked if there were any questions, and hands shot into the air.  Many of the inquiries focused on substitutions – whether you could replace the dairy entirely with low-fat milk, or if you could use a different kind of cheese.

My favorite exchange occurred when an audience member asked whether she could substitute egg whites for the whole eggs.  I told her that, considering the recipe calls for six eggs for the entire pan of bread pudding, which was large enough to feed a crowd as a side dish, an individual serving would probably contain fewer than half of an egg’s worth of cholesterol.  As I watched her ponder the math of it all, I added that, if she’s worried about fat and cholesterol, she ought to have been much more concerned with the two cups of Gruyere that get melted on top of the bread pudding.  Laughter ensues, end scene.

Get the Roasted Garlic Soup recipe!

Get the Caramelized Onion Bread Pudding recipe!

I wonder if anyone at the New York Botanical Garden could tell that I had never done a live cooking demo before?

The week leading up to the point where I would take the stage as part of the Edible Garden series went by like a blur – five days that were filled with a sense of excitement tinged with a moderate degree of anxiety.  Was I excited to have the opportunity to cook in front of a live audience?  Absolutely.  Did I have any notion of how one goes about preparing for a live demo?  Not really.  My greatest fear was that of the unknown – I had never been to the New York Botanical Garden before, had never seen the Kitchen Conservatory Stage, and could not, therefore, envision any of the setup in my head.

My wife encouraged me to practice, and I’m glad that she did.  I ran through the recipes at home, having selected a roasted garlic soup for one dish, and a caramelized onion bread pudding for the other.  Both were easy to prepare in a home kitchen, and readily lent themselves to being a showcase starter or accompaniment for a dinner party.  Each preparation contained steps that could be performed ahead of time, which was critical to a successful demo, and steps that could be shown to an audience to teach technique.  The only missing components were the words that were supposed to come out of my mouth while I was doing the cooking.  The cooking would be the easiest part.

I tried to do a dry run at home, recording myself with a camcorder.  It went fairly well, but  too much of it felt forced – I just can’t have a conversation with thin air, and the notion of practicing in front of friends and neighbors gave me more anxiety than the thought of doing it in front of strangers.  I came up with a basic outline of what I wanted to say, but I knew that at least half of my presentation was going to be extemporaneous.  Again, that darkness of the unknown reared its head, and I was stuck in limbo – both prepared and unprepared at the same time.

We stayed in a hotel the evening before the demo, just to minimize the potential for traffic delays.  Having reviewed the route to the New York Botanical Garden, and in consideration of the ingredients and equipment that I had brought with me, I decided that it would be quicker and less unwieldy if we drove from the hotel to the site instead of taking the subway or a cab.  Since we were staying in Jersey City, it looked like a quick hop up Interstate 95, a crossing of the George Washington Bridge, a twist here, a turn there, and we’re at the Garden.

As it turns out, it really, really, really isn’t that simple.

Checking out of the hotel reasonably on schedule, we packed up the car and headed out with plenty of time before the first demo was to start at 1pm.  New Jersey Turnpike traffic was light on Saturday morning, and we were cruising along.  I had already expected to hit a slowdown on the George Washington Bridge, but how bad could it be at 10am on a Saturday?

Would you believe incredibly, stupendously, horrifically BAD?

Four lanes shrank to two lanes in concurrent merges on the left and right, cramming the scrum of hot metal together into a soup of exhaust and frustration, with mere inches separating bumpers.  We crawled through the tolls at a pace that was so slow, I could have paid the $6.00 in pennies, with change to spare.  Our Civic fought its way through the traffic, inching along the upper deck as the minutes ticked away.  Thankfully, our GPS instructed us to take the exit immediately following the bridge crossing…right into the heart of the Bronx.

As anyone with a GPS can attest, the device has no independent judgment of its own.  It operates purely on logic and algorithms and programming routines that dictate that the best route is always the shortest, even if it’s only shorter by an eighth or quarter of a mile.  So, instead of channeling us to the New York Botanical Garden via the Henry Hudson Parkway, a pretty drive accentuated by views of the river and trees and a speed limit of 50 MPH, the GPS took us through the Bronx, which features traffic lights every quarter mile, double-parked cars, jaywalking pedestrians, and trucks in assorted states of loading and unloading.  And time continued to drip away from us.

We finally arrived at the New York Botanical Garden shortly after 11am.  I rushed to the stage, carrying my canvas bag filled with garlic and onions that I had prepared previously, my Santoku knife, and my mandoline.  As we approached the stage, the magnitude of the afternoon’s events started to dawn on me as I saw, for the first time, row after row of empty chairs, arranged in front of an elevated stage.  There was no time to let it sink in – I had to start my prep work immediately if I was to be ready for a 1pm showtime.

After a few minutes, my nerves settled and my heart rate eased.  I familiarized myself with the location and operation of the stove, the oven, and the sink, and took inventory of the four large bags of ingredients provided to me by Whole Foods.  I checked my watch, took out a cutting board, removed my knife from its holder, and started cooking with an hour and fifteen minutes to prepare.

To Be Continued…

Honestly, I have no idea how this happened, and in many ways it still feels like an odd dream that I will wake up from at any given moment.  Until that time comes, I suppose I can reveal to you that, on July 31, I will be giving a cooking demonstration on stage at the New York Botanical Garden, as part of their Edible Garden exhibit that runs from now through October 17.

As the driving force behind The Best Food Blog Ever, I receive a lot of food-related emails throughout the week.  Many are from marketers and public relations folks, letting me know about the opening of a new restaurant or the availability of a new product that would be of interest to my readership.  So, when I received an email from the New York Botanical Garden telling me about their Edible Garden series, I initially thought it was just an announcement, and that I was one of hundreds of others on an email distribution list.  As I read through the rest of the email, though, which talked about how chefs like Rick Bayless and Mario Batali and Sara Moulton would be taking to the stage to give cooking demonstrations, I reached the final paragraph, which began with this sentence:

“We hope that you will be interested in doing a cooking demonstration this summer or fall.”

I admit, I had been skimming up to that point.  Reading that made me rewind to the beginning to review the entire message more carefully.  Martha Stewart.  Lidia Bastianich. Rick Bayless.  Dan Barber.  Mario Batali.  Me.  Something doesn’t quite fit here, and here’s a hint – it’s not Rick Bayless.  And yet, there is no mistake – the New York Botanical Garden is extending the invitations to a handful of food bloggers in this, the second year of the Edible Garden series, and I’m one of them.

Saying yes to this wonderful opportunity has kicked off a series of weird-to-me-ness that won’t stop until it culminates in my cooking demonstration on July 31.  The New York Botanical Garden needed a headshot, which I had to scramble to produce, considering the only profile photos that I have here are blurry (and I am drunk in all of them).  They asked if I wanted to promote my book, which I would love to, but I don’t have one.  They even asked me if I needed a prep chef, which is so many kinds of awesome that it almost makes me want to make something uber-complicated just to have someone chop stuff for me.  I get to play on stage with a Viking range, Anolon pots and pans, and an entire pantry of ingredients provided by Whole Foods.  It’s like Top Chef, only I get more than five minutes to come up with what I’m making.

I’m beginning recipe testing this week, and the good news is that I only need to come up with two or three dishes that are appropriate for the stage and which will provide samples for the audience.  Soup is one of them, I know for sure.

For those of you who want to come out and meet up, my stage times are at 1pm and 3pm, and July 31 is a Saturday.

It’s funny to think that I’ve been writing The Best Food Blog Ever for over two years and I’ve never actually talked about my most exciting food experience.

Well, that changes today.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited by Foodspring.com to compete in a contest describing my most exciting food experience, and it’s currently live and ongoing, with voting lasting until Sunday, June 6th.  I’m competing against seven other stellar food bloggers, and as a result I need your help to win all of the food blogging marbles.

The experience that I chose to represent The Best Food Blog Ever is one that I’ve never alluded to on this site, primarily because it happened years before I even started writing about food.  The setting was the Isle of Capri, a sun-kissed dot of land in the Mediterranean Sea, off of the coast of Naples.  The meal that I speak of happened almost fourteen years ago, but I can still taste every nuance of the dishes and smell the breeze coming off of the ocean as if it were yesterday.

Click here to jump to the contest entries, and thanks for your vote.

While I was a longtime subscriber to food magazines through my early cooking years, after a while I began to realize that I was seeing the same recipes year after year.  Every May, for instance, brought the secrets of the perfect burger.  Every fall, I saw the same recipes for squash soup and roasted turkey.  This would have been tolerable, if not for the fact that, other than the recipes and advertisements, there was often very little else to read in each issue.  Once Epicurious.com launched, providing me with free access to all of the same recipes that were contained in the magazines, there was little reason to continue paying for my subscriptions.

I can’t say the same, though, for Saveur magazine.  For close to fifteen years, I’ve been diligently picking up Saveur each month, and the back issues take up the bottom shelf of the bookcase that holds my cookbook library.  Saveur has always provided well-written content that provided a foundation and background information for the recipes that accompanied each article – while the other magazines eventually made their way to the recycling bin, my Saveur issues were digested from cover to cover, then carefully archived.  In fact, when it comes time to decide what to serve for a dinner party, I pull out all of the current and prior months’ issues of Saveur from the stacks, yielding a pile of around 30 issues that serve as source material for my menu.  My collection used to be in chronological order, but has since evolved to be organized by season.

Because Saveur became the only food magazine that I read, it also happens to have become a major influence in my style of writing.  With food blogs quickly approaching a market rate of a dime per three dozen, I knew that I wanted to create a website that was more than just a collection of recipes or overviews of what I ate for lunch.  I wanted a site that reveled in writing about food as an experience, one that was a barometer of culinary culture, whether I was writing about an eight course tasting menu or a cheesesteak from down the block.  I respected and admired the writing style in Saveur and purposefully set out to emulate it, and sometimes I hit that sweet spot and sometimes I don’t.  It largely depends on how much coffee I’ve had.

When Saveur announced that they were soliciting reader submissions for their Top 100 list, I figured it would be fun to submit something.  I clicked over to their website, pulled up the form, and gave them a paragraph on the farmhouse table dinner at Talula’s Table.  Having written longer pieces on the topic once or twice before, it was fairly easy to dash together something quick and concise.  I hit ‘Submit’ and promptly forgot all about it.

One afternoon in October, I picked up my phone to see that I had one missed call and one voicemail.  The missed call was from the 212 area code, and I presumed it to be a misdial, as I don’t know anyone in Manhattan who would be calling my cell phone.

Listening to the voicemail revealed that the call was no mistake.  An editor at Saveur wanted to let me know that they were going to use my Talula’s Table entry in their Top 100 issue. I can count on one hand the number of times I have literally jumped for joy, and this was one of them.  But this was back in October, and the issue wouldn’t be arriving on newsstands until some time in January, long after Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the mad rush through the holidays.  Just as I had forgotten about submitting my entry in the first place, I tried very hard to put the notion of appearing in a national publication out of my mind.  It could have been, after all, cut due to space reasons.  The editors could change their minds.  The Large Hadron Collider could have spawned a black hole and ended the planet before it was published.  Until I held the hardcopy issue in my hands, it would not be real for me.

About two weeks ago, the current Saveur issue featuring the Top 100 became available in digital format.  I pulled it up on my browser, and while I saw my words laid out on the screen, part of me still couldn’t accept the reality of the situation.  But, there it was.

As it turns out, the world of magazine editing is a strange and wondrous place.  On the submission form, I had initially given them a single paragraph, knowing from previous Top 100 lists that each entry is allotted a very limited amount of space.  Saveur came back and asked me for more details, so I gladly wrote a longer piece, about four paragraphs.  Ultimately, the final copy that appeared in the issue had been edited – back down to one paragraph.  It still contains the major points of my original work, so I can’t help but be pleased with it.

It was only last week, when I spied the issue on the magazine rack at the supermarket, that it really felt real for me.  I grabbed a copy and flipped to the center of the issue to find my Talula’s Table entry staring back at me.  My name, my photo, and my words have been published in Saveur, the magazine that has propelled my food writing endeavors from the very beginning of this site.  It’s a small paragraph, to be sure, but it’s a start.  It’s not a feature article by any stretch of the imagination.  Still, the piece, #52, occupies the entire center of a spread that spans both pages, accompanied by a photo of a party enjoying the farmhouse table dinner.

It was a wonderful way to begin the new year.

Long before I became a food blogger, I was an avid food blog reader, and for the past few years I’ve sat back and watched in awe and admiration as the Menu for Hope campaign brought food blogs together to raise money for charity.  Created by Pim Techamuanvivit of Chez Pim five years ago as a way to help the victims of the tsunami in Southeast Asia, Menu for Hope has become an annual affair which today benefits the United Nations World Food Programme, which helps to feed hungry folks the world over, assisting them to become self reliant.

I am proud to be able to say that, this year, The Best Food Blog Ever is going to be a part of Menu for Hope for the first time.

Today, December 14, sees the launch of the 6th edition of Menu for Hope.  Over the past three years, Menu for Hope has raised almost a quarter of a million dollars for the UN World Food Programme.  But here’s the kicker – the majority of that money came from donations between $10 and $50.

Here’s how it works: the fundraising is performed by raffle for several glorious bid items.  Every tax-deductible contribution of US$10 buys you one ticket to win one of the items contributed by myself and other participating food bloggers – each bid item on each blog has a code that you specify as part of your contribution, and you can buy more than one ticket for the same bid item to increase your chances.

The campaign ends on Christmas, and the results of the raffle will be announced on Chez Pim on Monday, January 18, 2010.  I’ll arrange to have my bid items sent to the winners, and the funds raised will go to the United Nations World Food Programme.  All of the donations are processed by FirstGiving, an online fundraising company that has handled all of the monies for Menu for Hope since the campaign’s inception.

Here’s the fun part – the items!  Please note the shipping restrictions on each bid item when placing your donation.  The Best Food Blog Ever is offering the following three bid items this year:

UE20 is a Set of Six Cookbooks that belong on everyone’s ‘active cookbook’ shelf.  It includes copies of The Joy of Cooking, Boy Gets Grill, On Food and Cooking, Bakewise, Elements of Cooking, and Ratio.  With a retail value of nearly $200, this set could be yours for the $10 cost of a single raffle ticket.  Be sure to include the reference to the bid item code UE20 with your donation.  These books were a generous donation by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Please note that shipping for this item is restricted to the United States.

UE21 is an Stainless Kitchen Tool Set by All-Clad.  Check it out, you get a slotted spoon, solid spoon, fork, ladle, and turner, all in a nice matching caddy.  Worth $120 at retail, this will be the absolute last set of tools you’ll ever need, and owning them will make you hate cooking in other peoples’ kitchens.  To get a shot at this item, include the bid item code UE21 with your donation.  Much thanks to our friends at All-Clad for donating this prize!  Please note that shipping for this item is restricted to the United States.

Here’s the biggie.  Bid item UE22 is a bundle package of the Nespresso Le Cube Espresso Machine coupled with the Aeroccino Plus Frother.  I actually own a Nespresso machine, and it makes espresso on par with the best cafes in Europe – it’s that good.  But you know what makes the espresso from my Nespresso even better?  Steamed milk and a dollop of froth straight from my Aeroccino Plus.  It’s an incredible frother that has both hot and cold options, and two little propellers for froth/no-froth.  With a retail value of $349, this prize is worth multiple donation entries because, trust me, you want this bundle on your kitchen counter.  Be sure to reference bid item code UE22 with your donation.  The Le Cube and Aeroccino Plus were donated by our friends at Nespresso.  Please note that shipping for this item is restricted to the United States and Canada.

If you have any questions about Menu for Hope, check out Chez Pim and read her main Menu for Hope post, where you can also find a master list of prizes across all food blogs.  Thank you in advance for your generous participation!

Instructions for Donating:

1. Choose a bid item or several items from the master list.

2. Go to the donation site and make a donation.

3. Each $10 contribution gets you one raffle ticket toward a bid item of your choice. You must specify which bid item you’d like in the ‘Personal Message’ section in the donation form when confirming your donation. If purchasing multiple raffle entries, you must write-in how many tickets per item, referencing the bid item codes. For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for UE22 (espresso machine), 1 ticket for UE21 (kitchen tools), and 2 tickets for UE20 (cookbooks). If you were doing this, you would write 2xUE22, 1xUE21, 2xUE20.  On the other hand, if you wanted to get 5 chances at the Nespresso bundle, you’d write 5xUE22.

4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we can claim the corporate match.

5. Please check the box to allow us to see your email address so that we can contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.

Happy Giving and Good Luck!

The Best Food Blog Ever Screen Saver is now available!

This project started when I came across a software application that let me build screensavers.  I figured it would be nice to market a screensaver that featured the photos that have appeared on The Best Food Blog Ever, especially since most photos are often used only once to accompany an entry and never appear again in any other context.

I fired up iPhoto, scrolled to the very first photo, and started gathering the best food pictures.  As it turns out, I had been taking pictures of my food well before I began writing about the topic, and when I had finally reached the end of our photo collection, I had tagged well over 300 pictures!  You may recognize some of them from The Best Food Blog Ever, but there are also quite a few notable shots from our trips to Paris and Italy, which occurred years before I even had the idea to start this blog.

With that said, you can download a free trial of the screensaver by clicking here, or by clicking on the graphic on the website.  If you enjoy the photos and would like to continue using the screensaver after the trial period ends, the purchase price is $4.99 99 CENTS.  Once you have completed your purchase, I’ll receive an email with your name, and I’ll send out a registration code which unlocks the full version.

As you may have read earlier, we are expecting our first child soon.  Seizing the opportunity to expand the blog empire, and wanting to spare you all the discomfort of reading blog entries that have absolutely nothing to do with food, today I am announcing the launch of The Best Parenting Blog Ever.

While I may occasionally mention the Sprout in these pages, mostly when the worlds of parenting and cooking collide, for the most part all of the news and updates of our new status as parents will be found on the other site.

As with this site, there’s a variety of ways to stay connected with The Best Parenting Blog Ever.  You can follow me on Twitter as @BestParentBlog.  As always, you can add the new site to your RSS reader.  Or you can just drop me an email at ddl[at]bestparentingblogever.com.

Thanks again,

DDL