No worries family! It’s only a temporary adoption. A fostering of sorts…
I’ve been adopted by a veteran blogger. Thanks to the Adopt-a-Blogger program conceived by Kristen of Dine and Dish, Andrea, of Andrea’s Recipes, will take my newbie self under her veteran wings for a few months.
I applied for this program in hopes of branching out in the food blog community. Also, I yearned for an opportunity to communicate with an experienced and successful blogger. I’m excited to see what happens!
Meet Andrea /
Andrea is work-at-home wife and mom living in the Northern Virginia/DC Metro area. On her blog, she shares her culinary and garden adventures. Especially impressive is her program, Grow Your Own. Andrea describes this program as a ‘twice-a-month blogging event that celebrates the foods we grow or raise ourselves and the dishes we make using our homegrown products.’ She is just a natural at bringing the foodie community together!
She also writes for FoodieView.com , and many Media outlets have discovered and featured her writing as well. Here are just a few, see her blog for the full list:
- Chicago Sun-Times – featured Quick Whole Wheat Pizza Dough
- Reuters UK – featured Sweet Iced Tea
- BlogHer.org – featured Pommes de Share (Southern Style Fried Apples)
Andrea interviewed me via e-mail for her post about our Adoption. I thought it a great idea to interview her ‘back.’ Read on for her responses and be sure to check out her blog!
Interview /
What is one of your favorite (if not THE favorite) recipes on your site?
It’s hard to choose, but I would say I can eat pizza almost any day of the week, especially pizza caprese.
How many cookbooks is your collection up to these days?
I used to keep track but lost count somewhere around 125 or so. I had to count again just so I could answer this question…196. Some people read novels, I read cookbooks.
Do you find culinary inspiration from your family?
My family is a bunch of Southerners and we like our fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, country ham, beans cooked all day with a ham bone, cornbread (not the sweet stuff), you get the idea. There is definitely a strong Southern influence in my life, but it’s balanced with a taste for international cuisines. After spending eight years overseas, my tastes changed forever, and then of course I had to learn to cook all over again after marrying my New York-bred part Italian and part Polish husband. Our menus have a lot of variety.
How long have you been gardening?
I grew up with parents who gardened, though I can’t say I was exactly interested as a kid. My mother will tell you I hated it! I was sure I had a black thumb until about 14 years ago when I bought my first calamondin orange bush. It flourished and had beautiful little oranges, and I was hooked. After moving back to the U.S. in 1997, I set up a small container garden with tomatoes, peppers, and herbs, and I’ve had a garden ever since, both indoors and out.
What is your favorite ‘edible’ to grow?
Green onions (scallions) because they are so easy. Just save the the roots with about 2 cm of the white part of any green onion you buy in the store or market, plant it in a pot with good soil, and in a few days you’ll have green tops sprouting. I have a window box with two rows of scallions in it, and they are thriving.
Best gardening tip you’ve heard?
A safe, non-toxic method for getting rid of whiteflies, a serious pest. Sometimes whiteflies move indoors with plants brought in for the winter, and if left unchecked they can destroy your indoor garden. At the first sign of whiteflies, hang pieces of bright neon yellow cardboard coated with petroleum jelly next to your plants. The whiteflies are attracted to that color and get trapped in the sticky goo. Leave it up for a couple weeks, enough time to go through a couple cycles of emerging flies, and then you’ll likely be rid of them. I did this last winter after an invasion killed off my hydroponic basil, and it interfered with their reproductive cycle and saved the rest of my indoor herbs.
And, the best one you’ve discovered?
Cilantro doesn’t bolt (go to seed quickly) in cooler weather, so grow it in the spring and fall, seeding every couple weeks to keep a running supply.
How did you arrive at the idea for Grow Your Own and how has the online/blogger response been?
In August 2007 I started searching for a blogging event that featured dishes made with homegrown foods, and I couldn’t find one. I was a little timid at first and wasn’t sure how many bloggers would be interested, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised. The response to Grow Your Own has been great and we have bloggers from all over the world participating and sharing hosting duties.
What places have you traveled to that have inspired the most culinary inspiration for you?
The places I lived overseas certainly had an impact: Saipan, Colombia, Saudi Arabia. Thailand, China, and Italy also provided plenty of culinary inspiration.
I noticed that you have extended the reach of your blog/writings onto other sites. How would you suggest a newbie blogger tap into additonal opps for writing online (i.e. syndication)?
Start with the sites you read and enjoy. Sites with multiple contributing authors will occasionally post calls for writers. If you have an interest in content syndication, try organizations like Blogburst.com. They have partnerships with mainstream media organizations such as Reuters and USA Today that choose blog content to feature on their own websites. I’ve been very pleased with the way Blogburst has helped get my blog posts onto some major media sites.
What tip(s) in general do you have for a newbie food blogger like me?
These are just some basics that come to mind; some I wish I had learned earlier in my blogging journey. And of course these tips are written to a generic “you.”
Be passionate. Tell the story. Of course I say this but I must confess my struggle as a recipe writer and instructional designer because I want to maintain a balance between the recipe and the story. I want to write recipes clearly and provide enough detail that anyone can reproduce the dish at home, but I want to tell a story about the dish, too. Sometimes the story is the adventure I had while trying to make a dish, or it’s the memories a dish evokes, or maybe it’s all the reasons why I made the dish the way I did. No matter what, I want my writing to show my love of food, cooking, and family. I can’t say I’m always successful, but I try.
Respond to comments on your blog. Some bloggers like to respond in the comments, while others prefer to email, and some do a little of both, such as answering relevant questions publicly in the comments and responding offline to general comments. Either way, readers like to know you care.
Read other blogs and participate in the conversation. There are so many blogs now it can be a little overwhelming, so just pick some that matter to you and follow them. Leave relevant comments.
Make friends with other bloggers and cultivate those friendships. If you are introverted as I am, it might be a bit of a challenge, but once you get to know some other bloggers in your area of interest it makes blogging even more fun. I believe “networking” is a very cynical term and it makes me think of a very small number of people at BlogHer 08 who went from table to table, room to room, handing out as many business cards as possible while not even glancing at the card I gave to them before moving on to the next group. That’s not relationship building. Twitter and Food Blog Scool are good, fun places to virtually meet and hang with other bloggers.
Learn a little HTML and CSS, even if you can afford to hire someone to design your blog. No matter what blogging platform you choose, having a little tech knowledge will make your life so much easier.
Design matters. Make sure your blog is readable and accessible. Red text on a green background isn’t going to work for color blind people, size 8 font is too small for anyone over 40 (like me), and posts written with all the text aligned center can be very difficult to read.
Make sure your readers can find what they want. Use tags and categories and provide easy access to those. Provide a search box or at the very least archives or an index of posts.
Please visit her blog at: Andrea’s Recipes. If you are interested in the Adopt-a-Blogger program, or just want to learn more about it, visit Dine and Dish.
What a great interview! I’ve been reading Andrea’s blog for quite some time now and learned a lot that I didn’t know!
Thank you! I had fun doing the interview!
Thank you Kristen & Andrea! Andrea and her blog offer so much interesting material to fuel my interest and questions :)