Soul Food

Do I really need another blog?

Nobody needs a blog. I do like writing and reading about food. I like food. I love to cook. This blog will give me the opportunity to continue doing this and centralize the Food Goddess projects.

Expanding the ongoing conversation with family, friends, and my Bacon Posse is awesome; learning and trying new ingredients, new methods, gadgets, and spanning cultural and national boundaries dish by dish a great incentive.

The true labor of love is finding great, relatively easy recipes that can be tweaked in a variety of ways to prepare and consume great food.

This space is not necessarily about selling books, though the cookbooks (ebook and paperback) are certainly for sale and I hope to release more volumes. The Amapola Press blog will carry all the publishing news, but if new volumes are in the works, or available for sale, I will mention it here as well.

When I start working again, I hope to add restaurant reviews. In Brooklyn, Bay Ridge has a plethora of fantastic restaurants; Park Slope and the Heights have great bistros and cafes. Living in New York City does have its advantages in terms of great culinary adventures.

The Twitter feed will continue to run every weekend, providing relatively easy recipes for weekend chefs, some spectacular food porn, brown bagging ideas, and seasonal ideas for tailgating and/or picnics. These are aggregated recipes from the Internet which sounds like things I wish to try in my own kitchen, but also things for which family, friends, and readers have expressed an interest or desire.

When I do try these and then tweak them at least once, I will include the results here. This space also lends itself to book reviews and critiques of other published works.

On Pinterest I have aggregated some of the archives from the original Food Goddess food columns. Technical issues with that site have stalled some articles, but when they are resolved I may post there as well as here. For the moment, there are dozens or articles in the archives that served as the foundation for the original cookbook.

Also on Pinterest, there's a Bacon board. Everybody should have a Bacon Board! And apparently there is a request for a tome on the definitive book on bacon, which I have accepted as a challenge – because that's the kind of person I am...

On Facebook, my page Food Porn Aficionado remains open to all (not so my personal page which is reserved for family and personal friends only). I have considered and even designed a page for Amapola Press but I feel it is redundant with a Google+ page already in existence and the Amapola Press website. I'm simply not sure what more I could add that was unique to the page – without going insane trying to manage all that online presence.

So, why do I need another blog? Because it feels natural to centralize all the culinary stuff together and a blog allows me a different venue with which to post longer pieces that do not lend themselves to Twitter with its 140-word limit or Pinterest with its focus on visual images.

Like all my writing projects, this is a work-in-progress and I rely on you to let me know if there are topics, foods, products, cuisines that you'd like me to explore – because collaboration is always more fun!

I think this will probably start heavily skewed to Caribbean and Latin American foods, because that was the plan for the third volume of the Food Goddess series. This remains mostly a labor of love. The plan is to give you something interesting to read once a week and ideas to take to your own kitchen.

You may leave suggestions here, at the Amapola Press Google+ page or the Facebook's Food Porn Aficionado with ideas, requests, complains or opinions about past, current and upcoming posts. 

I'm thinking of starting with arepas – does that sound good to y'all?