To keep a food blog active I have to cook, but the blog obviously can’t eat the food. That means I need to prepare dishes the people I’m cooking for will actually eat. Here’s a recent exchange with Zoe that illustrates the challenge:
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 don’t know how other food bloggers manage to publish new recipes two or three times a week, or even more often. By popular demand, today I made Kalamarakia Krasata. Do other bloggers repeatedly cook the same dishes? I can’t post this recipe again since I just published it last week. On top of that, squid is sold to me in 3-pound boxes, so I ended up making a triple batch. My afternoon was spent chopping onions and parsley, grating tomatoes, and cleaning squid—tasks that don’t directly translate into new content for the blog.
What about the free time I had this morning? Also by popular demand (read: persistent begging), I spent part of the morning making Paula Deen’s Not Your Mama’s Banana Pudding. The recipe title itself says “Not Mama’s,” and since this site is dedicated to Mama’s Greek recipes, I’m reluctant to post non-Greek dishes here. Maybe I should start a separate blog—Lulu’s Kitchen, perhaps—but keeping up with Mama’s Taverna is already a stretch, so a second blog seems unlikely. In short, the pudding was another delicious but unbloggable effort for this site.
The pudding recipe yields a large quantity of very rich dessert, so I took half to my parents. My mom looked at it and announced, “We can’t eat all that!” My dad’s smile suggested otherwise—he’d happily eat it all—so my mom plans to experiment with freezing some of the pudding to stretch it out. After that visit I toured my parents’ garden, admiring the ferns unfurling and the tomato plants thriving in their tiny greenhouse (my mom kept pointing out, “On sale for only $30—stick your hand in and feel how warm it is!”).
Still, I wonder how other food bloggers manage the workload and the constant pressure to post new material.
UPDATE: The pudding is delicious!