Entries Tagged 'Contributors' ↓

Along with Reem from I am obsessed with food … and another outspoken female from confessions of a food nazi, I’ll be talking at the upcoming Eat Drink Blog conference in Melbourne on “Why we blog” on March 21. I’ll just give you all a minute to get the “but you never blog, you lazy sod” jokes. It’s a small-ish event, with only a limited number of places due to the nice dinner and cocktails we’ll be getting (largely thanks to the connections and charm of Ed from Tomatom). But I’ll be in town for a day or two, so perhaps some Melbourne PDP writers and friends could meet up?

My abstract (which seems a very fancy name, but anyway) is:

There are a million reasons to start a blog, but most blogs are quickly discarded. What will keep you going? The answers are as various as the many genres of blog that exist, even within the food blogging world. Identifying what you want your blog to be helps you create a space that feels right for you and attracts the readers you want to engage with. The first step is identifying what you want to say and why you blog – whether it’s to stretch a writing muscle or show your photographic chops, to share your culinary skills or the latest news, or simply to become part of a community of like-minded food nerds.

And another outspoken female has also suggested that I should talk about group blogging, and the particular benefits of that approach. Part of the reason I wanted to be part of a group blog was to alleviate the pressure/guilt of not posting very frequently, but what I value about it most is the collegial conversations we have around here. It’s all I could have hoped for when entering the food blogging world.

I’ve been thinking too, about the power of images in blogging. There’s a photo competition and exhibition in concert with the conference, and I put a few photos in for the hell of it – there are almost 400 images in the competition flickr group. I’ve always resisted the desire to have very beautiful and styled looking photos – I’ve had to, as I don’t have the expertise, equipment or ability to keep the family waiting while I take pictures. Mostly though, I wanted to see people eating, and bring the world forced away from the food through bokeh and the like back into focus.

Yet having had a camera meltdown and not having replaced it yet (my work is casual, was not needed over the long uni break and my taste in cameras have become more expensive than it used to be) has really held me back. I don’t see why it should, as I’m certainly not a particularly good photographer, but I think that taking the pictures often sparks the thinking. It’s odd, because I am a writer not a photographer, but the interplay between illustrative and/or decorative images, texts and links has always seemed to me the greatest technical fun of blogging.

I’ve really wanted to post the abundance of my veggie garden and a few special dishes and meals. I’ve tweeted a couple, but you can see the quality of the images deteriorate before your eyes:

Both of these, by the way, were from Sean Moran’s Let it Simmer. The first a lake of chocolate mousse in the crater of a flourless chocolate cake (which is essentially a cooked mousse) and the second a custard tart with a finger lime glaze (and I added a layer of thinly sliced figs to the top of the tart, and some rose geranium leaves to the glaze). New camera soon, and then right back to it.

In the meantime, I’d be very interested to hear any thoughts on why food blogging is an activity worth doing, and what might be interesting to hear about.

tor says she hates writing “About Me” paragraphs so I’m certainly not going to ask for another one.

At her blog “Adrift and Awake” she writes on:

Feminist snark, sex, the media and great big helpings of schadenfreude (Woman cannot live off sauerkraut alone, you see). Living the Australian dream in a draughty inner-west apartment (no really, I can hear kookaburras from my living room. In the middle of the city!) Procrastinating with style. Chain-smoking and bad TV indulgence

Her post on the importance of husband-approval units as currency in cookery blog threads is crossposted here.

I’m a lecturer in law who lives and works, cooks and gardens on Melbourne’s northern waterways. I write an occasional column, The Raw and the Cooked, for Arena Magazine, and have pontificated on matters culinary at various times for Overland, Eureka Street and the Australian’s Review of Books. My mum, a consumate cook in the Irish Catholic tradition, looks askance at my bloated collection of cookbooks.

Mad, Menopaused, Mother. Still Surf (badly), play Soccer (football) and Music (punk). Now the arbiter of the Sword Awards for Women Warriors! for feminist fighters, fictional or otherwise.

Blogs at Andragy and for the Marrickville Red Devils, and on twitter as @andragy.

Andra’s first post is on feasting and kid’s lit.

Dame Mint Pattie has worked in PR for more than 20 years and consequently is immune to spin, which makes living in Canberra either a constant source of amusement or bloody annoying –

depending on which side of bed she gets out of.

DMP puts her faith in small pleasures: the perfect cheese and pickle sandwich, a glass of good wine, or catching sight of a single shaft of sunlight parting the clouds like the hand of gog god (and sometimes types while she’s tipsy). She appreciates lovingly prepared meals made with painstaking attention to detail… just as long as someone else does the cooking.

Dame Mint Pattie blogs with her partner, our man in Canberra, at Our Notional Capital. She says of the genesis of the series she will be cross-posting here, an A2Z of Canberra Wineries:

We’ve lived in Canberra for a couple of years now but our knowledge of the local grape is shamefully lacking. Having visited one or two wineries in a very haphazard way, and with little to guide us other than the King James Wine Bible, we’ve decided to embark on our own leisurely winery discovery tour.

I should make it clear right upfront, we are not wine obsessives experts. We have no formal training in the art of sniffing, swilling and spitting but we know our preferences (and significant blindspots) reasonably well and also what wines compliment the modest fare that finds it way from our kitchen to the dining room table.

Over the next few months we’ll try to visit all the wineries that are open to the public around the Canberra region and share any worthwhile information in a very rough guide to Canberra wineries A2Z.

There are a huge number of wineries within an hour or so’s drive of Canberra, and I salute their bravery. The first in the series is on the Affleck vineyard. Welcome Dame Mint Pattie!

I am delighted to welcome ProgDins’ first international correspondent, Emica, an Australian living in the UK. By way of introduction, you should know that Emica left Australia for London four years ago and suffered a bit of a shock, going from low key Perth to the hustle bustle of Arab-Somali-Cypriot-Turkish north London.

Emica’s first memory is of standing on a stool at her mum’s butcher’s block aged about 3 “helping” make soup with carrot tops and potato peelings in a bowl of water. When she got a proper cubby house a few years later she played cooking with her mum’s out of date spices. So her love of food and cooking started pretty early and, with a few notable disasters (grey, rubbery Swedish meatballs in year 10 home ec, for example), it’s been a creative outlet and source of relaxation ever since.

Living in diverse, chaotic, amazing London has paid huge culinary dividends. She’s discovered Turkish ocakbasi (grill houses), Nigel Slater, Yotam Ottolenghi, pomegranate molasses and jerk chicken, experienced the highs and oh-so-lows of numerous curry houses, can tell a well kept pint from a stale one, eaten at Locanda Locatelli, continued the search for the perfect Vietnamese fresh spring roll and generally gone in search of good food across the UK and Europe.

Emica has never knowingly under-catered and she agrees with Nigella when she says that ‘the kitchen is a place to escape to, not from’.

Her first post is on avoiding the tourist traps around Trafalgar Square. Everyone say hello to Emica!

Nigel dropped out of medical school to study art and spent much of the 1970s as a Maoist conceptual artist in New York. How cool is that? He has been having more fun than he really should have ever since. His visually obsessed blog is artwranglers and he’s my boss, so behave.

Pamela Faye is a nice girl with a great appetite for the simple pleasures of life. A careless but passionate cook, her culinary specialties tend towards the northern Americas, and she regularly inflicts delights such as pumpkin pie and banana/walnut/maple muffins on those in her immediate orbit. What she lacks in biting wit and gourmet cooking skills she makes up for with lashings of enthusiasm, sincerity and saturated fats.

Pamela Faye also loves a road trip. Her passionate obsession with recording the back-stories of historical films and photographs is the justification for her present journey, which will be taking her from Canberra to Alice Springs, and then off the bitumen and into to the Aboriginal communities of the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in Western Australia.

Inspired by the thought that there may be some as yet undiscovered relationship between digestion and direction, Pamela Faye will be documenting her eating encounters along the way. If a food-frontier exists somewhere to the north-west of the truffle-oiled, baby-rocket fuelled, organic goat-cheesy world of south-eastern Australian gastronomy, she’s determined to find it.

Pamela’s journey begins here.