Document Actions
Just like your motherboard
used to make
story Jessica McElfresh | photo Zac Goodwin
While writing about food may not sound quite as appealing as eating it, food blogs are rapidly gaining popularity. Type “food blog” into Google, and you’ll get tens of millions of hits.
Food blogs provide a platform to edit recipes, discuss entrees or whole meals, and pose questions. Beyond the inclusion of cookbooks, food blogs allow bloggers to write about the ways in which they experience food and document their culinary endeavors with photos.
Jocelyn McAuley has been blogging for over three years but it wasn’t until she stumbled upon the food blog “World on a Plate” (worldonaplate.org) that she realized, “Hey! I can do this! … I was trying to create the ‘perfect’ pad thai (isn’t that sooo Eugene?) and was forever losing my recipe notes on what worked for me.”
McAuley, otherwise known as “McAuliflower” writes her blog, browniepointsblog.com, under the tagline “a good girl’s notebook of her culinary world.” She graduated from the University of Oregon in 1997 with a degree in biology that has given her an innate curiosity about the world and the urge to try creative ingredients: Liquid Nitrogen Sorbets, anyone?
“Good food blogs have a personal voice to them — a recognizable palate and style — and a veracity that cookbooks can’t come close to,” says McAuley. “I can check in on a food blog week after week and get to know that author in a way I will never know a cookbook author.” However, McAuley adds, food blogs written by novices can be frustrating when they make recipe-writing mistakes.
Kyrie Juchemich is a baker extraordinaire. Her blog, cakenbake.blogspot.com, features an ever-evolving showcase of her experiments at home or in one of the two bakeries where she works (Mangiamo and Metropol).
Juchemich started her blog in October 2007 to show her relatives, who live in Gladstone, Oregon, the treats she’d been working on. Her baking creations include peanut butter and jelly cupcakes and “Better than Sex” cupcakes filled with dulce de leche. With a full load of classes and a forty-hour work week, Juchemich spares precious time for baking because she is in love. “I’ll probably do nothing with my psychology degree,” she says. “But for me, baking is a comfort.”