Food blogging and simple gifts

Every year around this time, I like to share a little something about gifts. Last year, it was the humble gift of an orange that meant so much to my grandmother growing up on a farm in Illinois. Two years ago, it was the amazing gift of the poetry of e.e. cummings, first shared with me in grade school, a beautiful poem about a tiny Christmas tree. And the year before that, when Blue Kitchen was not quite two months old, it was about our non-traditional tradition of Christmas Eve dinner in Chinatown and a joke about gifts that transcended language barriers.

This year, I’ve been thinking about the gifts this blog has given me.

Gift one. I fell hard for publishing as a teenager. I got my first taste on my high school newspaper. Then I started an underground literary magazine with some friends, The Grub Street Journal. In college, I started another one.

After college, more publishing adventures followed. Scattered bits in magazines and community papers, a stint as a production editor for a trade publication. Marion and I even published a well-received but short-lived weekly newspaper for a while. That last adventure was punishingly hard work, but exciting, and I still occasionally thought wistfully about ways I could get back into publishing without losing my mind or my shirt.

Enter blogging. Blogs offer publishing with practically zero start-up costs and no printing costs, the thing that eats many publications alive. Circulation is potentially global and involves no delivery vans. Best of all, it appealed to my amateur instinct, in the best sense of the word. I could combine my love of writing, photography and cooking in one enterprise that would be as good or as slapdash as I had the skills and attention span to make it. And in this risk-free environment, I could mess around exploring what interested me and let it find its own audience.

Gift two. I’m a good cook, but not a great one. I know this about myself. But blogging makes me a better cook. Because I write this blog, I find myself reading, thinking and talking about food on a daily basis. Cookbooks, food magazines, fellow bloggers, grocery store aisles and even smells wafting from restaurants are all fodder for cooking ideas.

So are more arcane inspirations. On my computer desktop at work, I keep a jpeg file of a travel photo. I no longer remember where I found it and have no idea what place it is. It’s of a small village clinging to a seaside cliff. Maybe it’s somewhere along the Mediterranean, maybe not. The buildings are impossibly brightly colored, the streets impossibly narrow and steep. The very first thing I thought the first time I saw that picture was, “I wonder what you would find to eat in this place.” I keep it on my desktop so I can occasionally open it and look at it. And every single time I do, I wonder exactly the same thing.

Blogging makes me more thoughtful about food—where it comes from, how different cooking methods change it, how different flavors combine and how we respond to these flavors. And it makes me a more curious cook, more adventurous, more ready to borrow ingredients, techniques and traditions from all over, sometimes using them as originally intended, other times mixing and matching with abandon.

Gift three. This one was the biggest surprise. I mean, I pretty much expected that I would enjoy exploring the electronic version of publishing. I expected I would improve my cooking chops too, out of sheer vanity if for no other reason. What I wasn’t prepared for was the amazingly warm community I’ve connected with through this adventure.

Food blogs—specifically blogs about cooking—seem to tap into something primal in their creators and readers alike. Making and sharing food is perhaps the most basic, most honest, most human social interaction we all share. There are few higher everyday honors than being invited to someone’s home for dinner for the first time, and there are few bigger everyday pleasures than cooking for guests. Food blogs turn the Internet into one huge electronic communal table. At that table, we’re all on our best behavior, polite, open, caring, even charitable when need be.

And at that table, genuine friendships are forged. Marion and I have met and dined with dozens of fellow food bloggers, always a lively time where ideas, conversation and laughter all flow freely. There are dozens more bloggers and readers we know only online, but the connections are just as real. With some, there are open invitations on both ends to get together if we ever find ourselves in the same zip code at the same time. But even if we only ever communicate through emails and comments on blog posts, I feel richer for having them in my life.

Happy holidays, everyone. Welcome to the table. Thanks for sharing in the gifts of Blue Kitchen with me.