So You Wanna Blog?

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I've been food blogging since for almost three years and what I thought was going to be a passtime has turned out to be a passion, a living entity and something that consumes alot of personal time.

If you're thinking about starting a blog, there are no real rules but there are some things you should consider, some tips to better blogging and some behaviour you should avoid.

So, you've started a blog - GREAT! Congratulations. What's your blog's purpose? Who's your audience? Do you have the time to write? What will the frequency of your posts be? There's a blog for everybody and for every interest so now that you've started a blog, you have some responsibility. There will be followers of your blog who expect a routine, a schedule or some regular posts from you. Set the pace of your blog early.

Stay on topic, don't make your blog too long winded and be yourself. Don't try to discuss something beyond your boundaries/limits and if you do...do your homework. If your blog has photos, try and use your photos and if using others' photos, seek permission before using and heaven forbid...DO NOT use something elses' writings and pass it off as your own...you'll get busted real soon and your blog will be viewed by little.

Everyone wants traffic, comments on their blog, right? We all want attention, encouragement, acknowledgement. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. When I first started my blog, no one knew I existed...until I started commenting on other blogs. Circulate. Leave comments, leave genuine comments on posts that truly interest you. That's one of the best and easiest ways to draw traffic to your site. It's time consuming but it works. Once you've developed a knack for content and photography, you'll rely less on "marketing" your blog.

If you're going to choose controversial topics, expect to take some heat and be prepared for the good, the bad & the ugly. It's your blog, you do what you want but sometimes one can stray into dangerous territory. I recently got notice of a blog that dared to discuss the topic of circumcision and sure enough, a flame war commenced in the comments section and talk of banning people, deleting and name calling ensued. Not cool.

Which brings me to the topic of leaving comments. As a blogger, most of you will write posts and also visit other sites and leave comments. Give opinions, be a critic, correct an erroe and of course, give praise but whatever you do, behave as though you were a guest in someone's house. Being rude will get you uninvited, so to speak.

One general type of behaviour that will alienate you is to leave lame comments that are barely sentences and thir only purpose is to draw traffic to your site. People can see righ through a comment like, "This is delish and you should come visit me at www.mysite.com and the link below". For all intents & purposes, you morphed from a blogger to a SPAMMER.

The majority of bloggers in the food community are wonderful, nurturing people and I have qualms with few but with every community, there are some bad apples. The majority write entertaining, informative posts, some delicious foods, decent photography and posts are written at a consistent clip.

Find your niche, be yourself, be honest, treat your readers like your entertaining at your home, you'll find your style, you'll find an audience and ultimately you'll have a living, breathing entity called a blog with fans, readers, supporters. A little nook in the corner of the blogosphre.

This post was written by Peter Minakis

Are you interested in contributing to The Daily Tiffin? Drop us an email: thedailytiffin@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing your ideas.

Meal-time Inspiration

If you're the one cooking the meals for your family, finding inspiration for what to cook can be a job in itself (and you haven't even started cooking yet). We all have some regulars we all fall back on, but in all likelihood, we've all gotten stuck trying to figure out what on earth to cook tonight/tomorrow/whenever. And if you're like me, living in an area where a decent restaurant is nearly impossible to find, you've got all the more pressure, er, "incentive" to figure something out.

My first impulse is to try to pick out whatever fruit/vegetables/herbs/protein are currently in season (and ideally, locally grown) and see if any ideas emerge from that (e.g. citrus season, blue crab season, etc). Aside from being a big money-saver, this is one of the easiest ways to get the most flavor from your food, so let nature do the work for you.

My next impulse is to go to my fellow food bloggers. There's a lot of very creative people out there with focuses on certain regional foods, styles of cooking, or even all things cake. I also like to go window shopping--we eat with the eyes, too, right? Until you find the sites you want to read regularly, it can be a bit daunting given how many great food blogs there are out there, but finding something that catches your eye is never difficult.

Another favorite place for me to go, my seemingly never-stops-growing collection of cookbooks. Since finding a great cookbook can be a rare thing (I have found plenty of not so good ones, unfortunately), I thought I'd share a few of my favorites:

• Mastering The Art of French Cooking, Volume One by Julia Child. You may have shied away from French cooking before, but there's a lot of surprisingly simple fundamentals that are the foundation of a lot of the food we eat today. Julia is one of the best teachers, with a charming voice that even comes through in this tome of a book, guiding you through the simplest and most complex of dishes and techniques. Not necessarily a quicky what's-for-dinner cookbook, but an indispensable one.


• Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. If you do any amount of baking, this book is spectacular. Breakfast, dessert, or whatever, the recipes are very approachable, the tone friendly, the photos beautiful, and most importantly, the end result tastes fantastic.


• Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey. If you're looking to get started with Indian cooking (and I seem to keep finding this to be true when I talk to people about cooking), this is a great place to get your footing. The recipes are adapted to be mindful of ingredients that easily accessible in western supermarkets and are easily approached even if you've never made a masala.


• The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz. If you've ever had an inkling to make your own ice cream, sorbet, or just about any frozen dessert, this is your go-to guide. Whether it be the classics or some off-the-beaten-path kind of flavors, this is a fun book if you like to keep your freezer stocked (as I do).

Lastly, whenever something pops in my head that I'd like to make, I jot it down on a list at home so that I don't forget it. Maybe it's from reading a web site, a great meal at a restaurant, or whatever. It's a good way to keep me from forgetting things and prevent my creative well from running dry.

Where do you find your inspiration for meal time? Magazines? Web sites? Books? Mystical incantations? I'd love to hear--dinner is approaching.

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This post was written by Mike

Are you interested in contributing to The Daily Tiffin? Drop us an email: thedailytiffin@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing your ideas.

The Great Pumpkin

When I was a child, I had an unexplainaible but strong aversion to pumpkin. All it was good for was making jack o'lanterns on Halloween, period. How could anyone possibly eat these things--they're not food! The pulp was merely a nuissance that slowed down carving a face on the pumpkin and the seeds were just garbage.

As with many things, I've come to realize how very wrong I was. First off, pumpkins are obviously food--very good food, as a matter of fact. They're another gourd-like type of squash which, like tomatoes, are one of those things you'd never think to call a "fruit." They can come in all shapes and sizes, whether it be a tiny one pounder or obsenely large 1,000+ lb beasts. There are more varieties than I can count, but as far as your kitchen is concerned, you generally want the smaller varieties (e.g. called "sugar pumpkin," "pie pumpkin," etc.) rather than the giants you carve faces in as there is a big difference in flavor (namely a lack of it in the bigger ones--trust me, I've tried). As for health benefits, the orange color ought to give this one away: they're loaded with lutein, alpha, and beta carotene, which means vitamin A to you and I. And the seeds that I maligned as a child are a great source of protein, zinc, and other vitamins.

Pumpkin factoids aside though, the real issue is how did I ever spend all those years blowing off a sweet slice of pumpkin pie? Why was I going for peanuts and sunflower seeds when I could have opted for toasted, spiced pumpkin seeds? I'm definitely making up for lost time this season. Every week now, I leave the grocery store with a few pumpkins so I can break them down and make pumpkin puree so I have it handy throughout the week (yes, you can always buy canned, but I personally think has a tinny taste, and really, making it fresh is very easy to do and requires very little of your time in the kitchen. You can make a lot, bag it up, and freeze it, too, taking it out as you need it).

Of course, there's a lot more to enjoying pumpkins than the traditional pumpkin pie and toasted seeds. You could make muffins, rice pudding style risottos, cookies, macarons, ice cream, or donut holes. Armed with pumpkin puree, the only real limit to pumpkin-based sweets is your imagination. Of course, you aren't limited to sweets, either. You could try a loaf of bread, savory pumpkin pie, pumpkin wild rice soup, pumpkin gnocchi, or even try your hand at Afghani cuisine and make kaddo bourani. Its surprisingly versatile and I certainly will have a lot of new pumpkin-centric recipes to share this season, both sweet and savory.

How do you enjoy this autumn fruit?

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This Post was written by Mike from Mike's Table

Guest Blogger at Chef Michele's

Hi Folks,

Don't forget today, I am guest blogging on Michele's Weekly Guest Blogger Event.

I am honored to have this opportunity and hope you all will join me at Chef Michele's today. I'll be telling a little story and presenting a recipe that I picked just for the event. As it always is on What's for lunch, Honey?, it has been tried and tested by my jury prior to the presentation.

Hope to see you there!