Food Blogging Is Hard to Do (Dyskolo pragma to Food Blogging)
In order to blog I have to cook, but the blog can’t eat the food, so I really have to cook stuff that the people I’m cooking for will eat. Here’s a recent conversation I had with Zoe:
Lulu: Hey, Zoe, give me some ideas for recipes I can make and post this week. Something you’d like to eat.
Zoe: How about sausages?
Lulu: But that’s not nistisima! I’m blogging nistisima!
Zoe: Ante pali me ta nistisma!
I just don’t know how the other food bloggers manage to get new recipes up two or three times a week, or even oftener. Today, by popular demand, I’m making Kalamarakia Krasata. Do other food bloggers have to make the same things over and over? Obviously I can’t blog about this again when I just posted the recipe last week. Not only that, but because I can only buy squid in 3 pound boxes, I’m making a triple batch. Thus I am spending my afternoon chopping onions and parsley, grating tomatoes and cleaning squid, all of which effort is unusable for blogging.
What about all that free time I had this morning, you ask? Well, also by popular demand (i.e., persistent begging), I spent part of my morning making Paula Deen’s Not Your Mama’s Banana Pudding. Besides the fact that the recipe title explicitly says, “Not Mama’s,” I don’t want to put non-Greek recipes on this site which is dedicated to Mama’s Greek recipes. I suppose I should have a non-Greek food blog too, something like Lulu’s Kitchen maybe, but given that I can’t even keep up with Mama’s Taverna, that seems a dubious proposition. Anyway, it was another unbloggable food effort.
The recipe made a huge amount of very rich pudding, so I brought half of it over to my parents. My mom looked at it and said “We can’t eat all that!” My dad looked at it and I could see from his smile that he thought they could easily eat all that. But my mom rations him, so she’s going to experiment with freezing some of the pudding. After that I had to tour my parents’ garden and see the ferns coming up and the tomato plants in their tiny greenhouse (“On sale for only $30, and so convenient, stick your hand in and see, it’s hot in there!”).
However do other food bloggers manage?
UPDATE: The pudding is delicious!
Comment by maria verivaki
hi lulu, to find 6 main meal ideas a week (7th day leftovers), i follow a kind of weekly plan: http://organicallycooked.blogspot.com/2007/08/weekly-food-plan_28.html i
if you notice from my food blog, i cook for a lot of people, and i don’t actually cook a wide range of meals. yesterday for example, we FASOLAKIA YIAHNI: http://organicallycooked.blogspot.com/2007/08/fasolakia-yiahni-stewed-string-beans.html
(i didn’t blog about it, but i did update the post i have already written on it), and today we’re having FAVA http://organicallycooked.blogspot.com/2007/11/fava.html .
so the leek spiral pie was a lucky break from the routine since i found the recipe on laurie’s blog; otherwise, i’d have stuck a hortopita from the deep freeze into the oven for the evening ‘snack’ meal. i think people who who have families are restricted in what they can make and eat, especially if kids are young.
Comment by maria verivaki
if i didn’t have a weekly food plan, i’d be cooking meat on a daily basis in this house on the request of my husband, on whom it has only recently dawned that some of his tradtional cretan food ideas are not that healthy any more once you hit a certain age (he’s 51)
Comment by lulu
I read your weekly food plan this morning, and I noticed that aspect of it!
Good for you!
Comment by James
I was going to make that calamari dish, but got carried away and made this:
http://www.thecotswoldfoodyear.com/2008/04/squid-curry.html
I think when you spend 14 – 16 hours a day with food then read cookery books as bedtime reading it’s difficult not to keep trying new things – there’s always another flavour you could try, or variation on something else – like deconstructing banana cheesecake….
Comment by Funky Grampa
Alak and alas! The immuntable law of food: Our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. Or So much food to explore and so few daily dinners.
Comment by lulu
Hi James! I didn’t occur to me that the banana pudding was a deconstructed cheese cake, but you’re right!
I too like trying new things, that’s why I need a non-greek blog, except for the slight problem of not enough time. Your squid curry looks delicious!
Comment by lulu
Hi Funky Grandpa! Thanks for stopping by! “…so few daily dinners.” Hm, that explains the vast backlog of recipes filling my desk (and nightstand, and kitchen drawers, and tucked into books, and…)
Comment by Laurie Constantino
My problem isn’t with coming up with things to cook, it’s with having the time to write about them. I honestly don’t know how Peter Minakis, for example, does it – there is just no way I can write every day and still have time for the rest of my life. Right now I’m very very backlogged with things to write about. It’s sad. I think we all have to go at our own pace.
Comment by lulu
Laurie, that’s exactly what I mean! I cook all the time, so I thought blogging it would be a piece of cake. But stopping to take pictures, then optimizing and uploading them, and then trying to think of something to say about the food, whew! I don’t know how Peter does it either.
Comment by Sam Sotiropoulos
I have taken the Greek approach to Food Blogging… “siga, siga” (slowly, slowly). After all, I am not really in any kind of rush and I prefer quality to quantity in both food and writing. But hey, I’m a funny bird.
Comment by lulu
Sam, that sounds like my approach to learning Greek: Matheno ligo ligo.
Comment by Lady Sweet Chips
All these recipes look fantastic. I especially like the fried eggplant.
Comment by lulu
Why, thank you, Lady Sweet Chips!