Will Blog For Food

Televised cooking shows have been around for upward of seven decades now, and in the last 10 years it almost seems as if everyone remotely telegenic who can handle a saucier has his or her own show.

The Travel Channel pays my new idol, Tony Bourdain, gods-know-how-much money to traipse around New Jersey in search of culinary discoveries. Yes, that's New Jersey.

And yet, still there are those of you out there yearning to express your culinary inner being to the world. Some of you are foodies who just like to whip up new and creative recipes and share them with the world. Some of you are experts in a certain area who either want to show off your talent or offer your advice. And some of you are darned near fetishistic about certain food items, cooking techniques or other aspects of the Foodverse. (Note to my editor: I'm invoking my right to invent words. Trust me, I have one.)

Some of you, like me, are fortunate enough to have found an employer whose hunger for content overwhelmed her normal good judgement and have created your own little corner of the Internet.

For the rest of you, and even for some of us who have other outlets, the wonderful world of blogs beckons. Blogs can be as simple as text on a page, or as elaborate as multimedia presentations with quality approaching that of TV shows. I won't go into the whole history of blogs here, as the last time I checked this is a food column, not a tech one.

I've gone exploring on the Internet, and the menu of food blogs I found with even the most casual of searches was rich and broad-based. Herewith, a few of my favorites that might serve as starting points for your own explorations.

Cooking For Engineers: For a "Good Eats" junkie like me, this may be the ultimate blog. Engineers are famed for attention to detail, and Michael Chu, the blog author, doesn't disappoint. For something as simple as a recipe for peanut butter cookies, he gets into discussions of trans fats in mass-market peanut butter and the effects of refrigeration on the dough. There are copious photos of everything from his mise en place to the ingredients in the mixer bowl and the finished products. Variations are discussed, and the whole thing is quite likely the most comprehensive examination of my favorite simple cookie I've ever seen.

There are cooking tests, too, including one concerning bacon-cooking methods that had me wanting to make a BLT in a big and special way. The geekspeak is kept to a minimum. Chu is one of those rare engineers who understands that "normal" folks don't necessarily always understand overly technical verbiage. He writes well, and the site's navigation is clean and efficient.

Get In My Belly!: Have you ever thought back to a meal you had a month or so ago and said, "Man, that was some good grub. If only I had a picture of the meal so I could go back and relive the experience!"

OK, maybe you haven't. But Cypher, who's put together this entertaining photoblog, certainly has. Using a camera phone and/or a digital camera, he photographs just about every meal either before or during consumption and adds a short note concerning the circumstances and setting of the meal. While the concept may seem shallow, you'll soon find yourself trolling through the pictures, either trying to imagine the taste of what Cypher pounded down his gullet or figure out if you've had something similar.

This may be the coolest use for a camera phone ever.

Gastroblog: There is a wide world of pretty much text-oriented blogs, and among them one of the finest is Gastroblog. It's written by a group of food-obsessed world travelers with a wide range of experience, and they write about eating with the same gusto P. J. O'Rourke shows when he writes about drinking. From a recent posting: "I hadn't eaten much meat in the last week, and my teeth were aching to sink into some flesh."

How can you NOT like a woman who writes like that? And she's not alone. There are almost a dozen writers under the Gastroblog umbrella, and they're all worth reading.

And, finally, quite possibly the weirdest (safe for work) food blog I came across in my explorations, Crying While Eating. As the name implies, what you get are photos (and video clips) of people crying while they eat. What they're eating and the reason they're crying is also listed.

This is what the Internet has brought us to, folks. If you've got some bizarre fascination for watching people eat and cry simultaneously, you've got a home. The oddest thing is, it's FUNNY. The people don't seem to truly be crying, and the situations in which they're supposedly weeping are quite bizarre.

But I'm going to stop looking at it now. I'm starting to worry about myself.

Got a nifty food blog? Know of one? Drop me a line, anytime! Large cash grants and professions of undying love also accepted.