Good Monday to you Dear Readers! It has been a while since I made a "10 Things You Should Know About Food Bloggers" list and truth be told this list has been sitting in my Moleskine for months waiting for me to transcribe it. The problem? My messy writing which would put any doctor to shame. I managed to decipher my swirly loops and without further ado, may I present you with my next 10 Things You Should Know About Food Bloggers!
Step 1 - Forget Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous (unless by narcotics, you mean an addiction to sniffing freshly ground spices), the foodus bloggerus has to check oneself into Cookbook Rehab. That is, the addiction to buying and collecting cookbooks rendering shelves buckled as a result and credit cards depleted. We may not even cook from any of them of course which is the somewhat startling truth as others may ask why we bother buying them but like an addict, some things are just hard to resist. And yes this includes cookbooks that are in French even though we can barely read the language and will spend hours typing it into an online translator in order to cook the recipe.
Step 2 - An addiction to butter. Sugar may be one thing but if you don't have a sweet tooth, butter traverses the sweet and the savoury. For those of us who grew up on margarine (and let's face it, a lot of us did as it was touted as the new, spreadable wonderspread when our parents were making our sandwiches) going back to butter is like having a new sense of taste opened up. It's the fifth sense aka the sense of butter.
Step 3 - The Food Blogger is often wary of health tests, particularly those testing cholesterol as above mentioned addiction to butter and copious sampling may supply us with alarming results. So make like an ostrich and bury our heads in the sand ignoring the creeping pounds and expanding waistline.
Step 4 - Like most people, the foodus bloggerus has a distinct dessert tank in their stomach. This may be more developed in a Food Blogger due to our a) predisposition for cooking sweets and b) our frequency of encountering sweets when we eat out, which is often you do see.
Step 5 - Food envy. You know the moment when your dining companions order something absolutely fabulous? We try and avoid this by copiously researching a place for their signature dishes or quizzing the wait staff (and a waiter's answer of "Everything is good here" is likely to induce panic and eye rolling from us). Luckily my friends are wonderful and will share with me. Lord knows that they've probably learnt through experience that it's just easier to share and surrender ;)
Step 6 - The Foodus Bloggerus has a love hate relationship with sites such as foodgawker and tastespotting. These two sites, among others, are the nightclub door people. You hate them when they don't let you in i.e. don't put up a photo and it's often so, so arbitary. They can be so cut throat when giving you a reason with curt and cutting answers i.e. "Poor compostion!" "Bad lighting!" but when they let you in, you feel like you got into the club. For the last few months I took myself out of the running with both and don't bother submitting to either anymore and it's great waking up and not being greeted with a pass or fail in my inbox.
Step 7 - Travelling with a food blogger is never a boring experience. Because Australia's quarantine laws are so strict, we always have to declare food and our luggage is usually over the weight limit weighed down by jars - for me jars of jams in flavours that we just don't get back at home (I came back with seventeen jars of jam on my last trip to Austria and Dubai). And when we recently came back from a trip to New Zealand and I saw that Border Security was filming I told them that I didn't want to be on camera just in case they saw my jars of jam and packets of biscuits which were enough to feed a horde of hungry wolves. I just wasn't in the mood to explain.
Step 8 - History gives us B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini). In blog land there is B.B. (Before Blog) and D.B. (During Blog). Food blogger regret is the anguish one feels when they think back to the the fantastic meals that they've eaten B.B. that is before the blog started and were never recorded (or recorded on phone camera and therefore aren't really of bloggable photo quality). All those years of dining out on the corporate credit card would almost raise a tear from me.
Step 9 - Our cupboards are full of single pieces of china and cutlery and sets scoured from vintage markets and stores that we use for props. We're also the ones that buy a whole tea set knowing that it will look great for one story and once it's done we realise that we've got enough china to open up our own store. I have so much I need to store some in my parents basement.
Step 10 - We are food-lingual. At least as far as menus are concerned. I speak great Menu French but having not progressed past French 101 at University not so much of the rest (although I can ask "Do you know the way to the hotel?"). We know our way through a menu in a huge number of countries but French is one language where we can often claim to be food-lingual.
So tell me Dear Reader or Dear Blogger, what other strange habits have you observed from our kind? ;)
To see the other two lists:
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