Food Blogging

My dear friend Abra is a wonderfully generous and multi-talented person. She's a great chef, has an incredible knowledge of food, a fabulous writer, a speaker of two languages, a green thumb, a singer, and has a wonderful knack for food photography.
She is now living in France, the south of France no less, working on writing a book. She is keeping a blog about her French experience called French Letters and all the wonderful food photos you see here were taken by her.

I hate her. I hate her in the way a good friend hates their friend when their life is significantly better than yours. It's a good kind of hate and not a hatey kind of hate.

I read her blog every day to keep abreast on what's happening in her fairy tale life (even though she has had some problems with "the French Cable guy" and her French plumbing, not to mention the fact that Air France misplaced all their baggage, and when she first arrived at her French house she had nothing to wear but the clothes on her back and a tablecloth.) She's also had to endure a bit of French road rage; experiencing a hand gesture that she'd never seen before, but could deduce that the gesturer was probably NOT inviting her to share a glass of wine with him.

So why am I throwing an American Pity Party? Because I'm tired of being a "large gal" and because most of my life since April has been all consumed with taking care of and worrying about my aging mother. I've been managing her life and my own and it's a lot of work. I've had to put my career on hold too. My life is in a strange holding pattern and I feel like bitching. So come to my party. There'll be lots of wine. Lots and lots of wine. Not to mention whine. Maybe some cheese. Because I am a "foodie" after all.

Le Veggies

Abra's blog is what is known as a "food blog". Food blogs are all over the internet. And, if you're a "foodie" you are no stranger to food blogs. My blog is a food blog, but in a much more loosely structured way. To me, there's more to food than food. There's the people who prepare the food, how you feel when you eat food, what you went through to prepare a dish yourself, playing with new and mysterious ingredients, experiencing good or bad service at a restaurant, how food affects your life, either positively or negatively, how people claim some foods are miracle foods, fad diets, the conspiracy of corn products in a lot of mass produced foods, the ethics behind foie gras......it goes on and on. THEN there are some food blogs out there that are nothing more than, "this is what I had to eat today", and those are the blogs I just don't understand. If you really want to hear people talking about what they had to eat today, just talk to an old person or go to a nursing home. They will go into great detail about their meals, because as you get older, eating is one of the pleasures they can still enjoy (if they are healthy enough anyway). A lot of them also grew up in time when food wasn't so plentiful, so they appreciate what didn't come so easily to them in their youth.

I guess all I'm saying is, if you're going to write a freakin' food blog, make it interesting! Tell me the story BEHIND that Swanson Hungry Man dinner.......and do you really take the plastic off the chicken and the brownie before you nuke it? Do you take the brownie out of the container midway through cooking time so it won't overbake or do you just leave it in there to become a piece of concrete? And why the hell are you eating a Swanson Hungry Man dinner anyway? This is what makes a food blog interesting. If you want some clues about good food blogging, just check out Abra's.