Dining Out

What’s cooking in other kitchens…

[Photo by Sarah McColl]

• In Brooklyn, Sarah dispatches her foodie blues with porkchops and pickles, à la française. [Pink of Perfection]
• In Columbus, OH, Becke mourns the loss of The Dog Joint, and its “Windy City Dog.” [Columbus Foodie]–
• In Clinton, MI, Paul and Mandy prove mix-masters with a brunch —a “subaverage” brunch!— that is partially homegrown (fried eggs, sourdough bread, quince jelly), partially foreign (butter, salt, pepper, coffee), and 100% covetable. [Dragonwood]
• In Arizona, Anne conquers her baking pan issues with milk chocolate mini bundt cakes. Verdict: sub in bittersweet chocolate and a ganache topping and it just might be a winner. [Anne Strawberry]
• And in Nashville, Rebecca pays tribute to the Big Easy via a “2-day-old baguette, a freshly opened bottle of Maker’s Mark and five delicious snowbound days.” [Ezra Poundcake]

Crazeee Foodiful: The Language Of Healthy Eating Blogs

[Crossposted from my other blog, The Topofiles]

The very first blog I read was a food blog, written by the irrepressible, uber-whimsical Clothilde Dusoulier, a Parisian software programmer whose blog chronicling the goings-on in her Montmartre kitchen was so good she was able to quit her day job and write anecdotal cookbooks and a bubbly guide to the shops, open air markets, and restaurants of her city. Over a year passed, however, before I read my first healthy-eating blog–which is an entirely different sort of beast. I had purchased a can of regular old fashioned oatmeal, instead of my usual instant, and couldn’t manage to microwave them without getting either an explosion or gruel at beep’s end. So, like any gen-Yer with a question, I went to google, and one of its first answers was from a blog called “For the Love of Oats.” I clicked, found what I was looking for and kept reading, fascinated. Besides endless bowls of oatmeal, the blogger posted every other thing she ate, and most of them weren’t the sort of things requiring recipes or stories. Plain salads, string cheese, peanut butter and jelly…the sort of thing you or I might put together half-heartedly in the bleary hours of the morning and eat, with even less enthusiasm, in front of our computer screens six hours later.