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BlogHer Food '09

Alanna Kellogg
Alanna Kellogg is the second-generation food writer for the food column Kitchen Parade which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2009 and the veggie evangelist at the food blog about vegetables, A Veggie Venture.

At BlogHer Food'09, Alanna is thrilled to connect real faces and voices to the hundreds of food bloggers whose sites provide so much inspiration and pleasure, @Life not @Twitter, and holds close the maxim that "And when we finally meet, we're already friends."
Amy Sherman
Amy Sherman is a San Francisco–based food writer and recipe developer and creator of the award-winning food blog Cooking with Amy, chosen one of the top five food blogs by Forbes and singled out by The Guardian (UK) as a top blog.

Cooking with Amy is listed as a “Site we Love” by Saveur, and linked to as a favorite by Cooking Light, Epicurious, Good Housekeeping and Redbook among others and was “blog of the day” on the Julie & Julia movie web site.

She is author of Williams-Sonoma New Flavors for Appetizers, Wine Passport: Portugal and wrote the introduction to a recent reprint of the classic Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book.

She is a frequent guest contributor at Cheers magazine where she writes about food and beverage pairing. She also writes about trends and culinary travel for Epicurious, writes restaurant reviews for SF Station (a local city guide) and was a weekly contributor at KQED’s food blog, Bay Area Bites for over five years.

Her corporate recipe development clients include Dannon, Dulcet Cuisine, MyWinesDirect and Oliso.
Bonnie Azab Powell
Bonnie Azab Powell is the founder and editor of Ethicurean.com, a 3-year-old group blog about food politics that has been cited by the New York Times, SFGate, the LA Times, and others. A former technology and business reporter, she now writes about food and farming for publications such as Mother Jones, the Washington Post, Edible San Francisco, Sierra, San Francisco Chronicle, Meatpaper, Culture, Gastronomica, and elsewhere, and is currently working on a proposal for a Meatless Mondays book on behalf of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. After being a vegetarian for 13 years, Bonnie began seeking out meat raised by small, sustainable local farms in 2005. Her personal interest in knowing where her meat came from led her to found the Bay Area Meat  Community-Supported Agriculture program (BAMCSA), which Slow Food Berkeley later took over and which has evolved into an online community for those interested in buying and divvying up whole animals, Meatshare.org. Somehow not having learned her lesson from the difficulties BAMCSA posed, Bonnie is now the volunteer manager of CSAs for Clark Summit Farm in Tomales, CA, and Soul Food Farm in Vacaville, CA. She lives in North Oakland, where she is impatiently waiting for her late-planted tomatoes to ripen and pondering raising rabbits for meat.
David Lebovitz
David Lebovitz worked as a professional pastry chef in the San Francisco Bay Area for over twenty years before moving to Paris. He launched his website in 1999 and is the author of five books, including The Great Book of Chocolate, The Perfect Scoop, and his latest, The Sweet Life in Paris.
Diane Cu & Todd Porter
Todd Porter and Diane Cu are photographers, videographers and cooking instructors from Los Angeles, CA. By day, they're busy on location shoots and in their photography/multimedia studio. By night, they share it all on the blog that they write together, WhiteOnRiceCouple.com, which they started in 2008. They also contribute regularly to Edible Los Angeles Magazine, LA Weekly Squid Ink and Ngoui Viet Daily News. Avid photojournalists, travelers, gardeners and cooks, they're continually documenting local, regional cuisines, capturing the connection between food and culture and they thrive on all things daring and adventurous. Their upcoming VietNam Culinary Tours project will embody all that they love to do together. Follow them on Twitter- @WhiteOnRice
Dianne Jacob
Dianne Jacob’s blog, Will Write for Food: Pithy Snippets about Food Writing, covers food writing trends and technique. She started it in 2009 as a way to update her book, Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Cookbooks, Restaurant Reviews, Articles, Memoir, Fiction, and More. Now in its fourth printing, the book won the Cordon D’Or International award for Best Literary Food Reference Book. Will Write for Food is used as a textbook at the Culinary Institute of America and in many other classrooms across the US.

Her most recent book is Grilled Pizzas & Piadinas, a cookbook she co-authored with chef Craig Priebe.

Previously a newspaper, magazine, and publishing company editor-in-chief, Dianne has been self-employed since 1996 as a writing coach, author, and freelance editor. She coaches writers across the US, Canada and Europe on writing and publishing books, freelance articles, and blogs.

Dianne judges for the James Beard Foundation and for the International Association of Culinary Professionals annual cookbook awards. She is also a regular judge for the Bert Greene Award for Food Journalism.

She teaches classes on food writing and book publishing at Book Passage in Corte Madera, The Writing Salon in San Francisco and Berkeley, and Leite’s Culinaria. She has also taught for the Smithsonian and UCLA’s Journalism Department. See her website for more information.

 

Elana Amsterdam
Elana's Pantry is the creation of eco-entrepreneur and gluten-free guru Elana Amsterdam.  Elana shares weekly recipes and ingredient selection, purchasing, preparation and meal-planning tips with the readers of her articles and visitors to her website, www.elanaspantry.com

She has written for publications including The Denver Post, The Boulder Daily Camera, Delicious Living, Delight Magazine, and Elephant and has been featured in a variety of publications including 5280, Working Woman, Crain’s New York Business, Fortune Magazine and The Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on CNN and MSNBC.

Her book, The Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook, was published by Random House in July 2009.  Advance orders online have been so strong that a second printing was ordered before the book was even released.

Elana lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband, 2 boys (chefs in training), 2 bunnies and 5 chickens.
Elise Bauer

Elise Bauer publishes the popular and award-winning food blog Simply Recipes. Six years ago, after a twenty year career in technology marketing consulting, Elise created Simply Recipes to keep a record of what she was learning from cooking with her parents. What started as a hobby during the last economic recession has grown to reach over 3 million site visitors a month, and now Elise manages it as her full-time profession. These days Elise spends most of each day cooking, taking photographs of food, and answering reader questions.  She knows it's not her life's purpose to be an online Betty Crocker, but that doesn't matter, she's having fun with it.

Elise also founded and runs Food Blog Search, a custom search engine that you can use to search thousands of food blogs for recipes.

You can find Elise on Twitter @simplyrecipes.

Garrett McCord
Garrett McCord began the blog Vanilla Garlic in 2006 as a way to learn about food and a means to practice his writing. His blog has been featured in numerous websites and publications such as The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. 

He also writes as a contributing author on Simply Recipes and Food Blog Alliance, and is a staff writer for Edible Sacramento magazine. His food writing has also appeaered in the Sacramento News and Review, The Sacramento Bee, Sierra Style, and Sacramento Magazine. In 2008 some of his recipes were featured in the UK cookbook Great Big Vegetable Challenge. 

He is currently working on his graduate thesis analyzing the rhetoric of the Slow Food movement in his English Composition program at CSUS. He has taught and tutored high school, college, and ESL students writing for five years. 

Garrett can be found on Twitter at @GarrettMcCord.

Genie Gratto

In her three years as The Inadvertent Gardener, Genie Gratto has documented her adventures in gardening and cooking in Iowa City, Iowa and, now, Oakland, California. Her journey to the West Coast has temporarily left her gardenless, which is giving her time to turn her eye more closely to sustainable agriculture, food systems, and hunger. As a member of a team of bloggers participating in The Hunger Challenge to raise money and awareness for the San Francisco Food Bank in September 2008, she chronicled her effort to keep her food budget under $21 for a week.

Genie is a BlogHer Contributing Editor, and can also be found spreading the word about food and hunger issues (among myriad other things) on Twitter (@egratto). When she's not blogging, serves as Communications Director for Public Health Law & Policy, a non-profit in Oakland that uses legal and urban planning tools to create healthier communities.

She also tells very short tales at 100 Proof Stories and is documenting her year in photos at 365 in 2009.  

Greg Massa
Organic rice, wheat, almond and duck farmer.
Heidi Swanson
San Francisco-based photographer and cookbook author Heidi Swanson is the creator of 101 Cookbooks. She is the author of Super Natural Cooking, a James Beard Award-nominated cookbook focused on natural foods. She is a contributor to Saveur.com and has also been featured in a wide range of national and international publications including Food & Wine, Fast Company, Glamour, Vegetarian Times, and the Washington Post.
Helen Dujardin

Helen Dujardin started Tartelette in late 2006 after she quit her job as an Executive Pastry chef for a restaurant in Charleston, SC where she currently lives. What started out as a way to catalogue her desserts and pastries, both in writing and photography, quickly turned into a full time career as a writer, food stylist and food photographer. She is a regular conributor of Desserts Magazine and Foodie View.

Her work has been featured in Desserts Professional Magazine, The Oregonian, Joshi Photo Magazine, Design Sponge, The Times Online, Saveur Magazine.com, Skirt! Magazine, among others

 Tartelette is one of 50 world's best food blogs as awarded by Times UK.

Helen can be found on Twitter at @SweetTartelette.

Jaden Hair, Steamy Kitchen

Jaden's popular food blog, SteamyKitchen.com launched in 2007 and has created an amazing full-time career for her as a television chef, food writer, food photographer. She is published every Sunday in The Tampa Tribune newspaper, talks about food and cooking live on Tampa Bay's CBS10 (www.10connects.com) and cooks twice a month on the Daytime Show that's syndicated in over 100 markets (www.daytimeonline.tv)

SteamyKitchen.com is one of 50 world's best food blogs as awarded by Times UK.

Jaden's first cookbook, The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook, hits the shelves Fall '09. Find Jaden on Twitter at @steamykitchen.

Jennifer Maiser

I am the editor of EatLocalChallenge.com, a place to share experiences sourcing locally grown and produced food. I am a San Francisco resident, and have encouraged thousands of people to pledge to eat locally since first hosting an online "Eat Local Challenge" in 2005. The site has been cited in dozens of publications including The San Francisco Chronicle, Time, the Associated Press, CNN.com, MSNBC.com, the New York Times website, Cooking Light, Fine Cooking, Chicago Sun-Times and Boston Globe. Additionally, "The 10 Reasons to Eat Local Food" has been republished in over 100 locations.

My online life began in September 2003 with a website, Life Begins at 30, where I began to voice my passion for local, fresh food and politics. It has since morphed into a personal site for my food musings and photography.

I am a regular contributor to KQED's Bay Area Bites and Serious Eats and can usually be found perusing farmers markets around the Bay Area.

I'm honored to be on the BlogHer Food Politics panel alongside some folks who I respect and admire. I look forward to a spirited dialogue and learning from the audience.

Jory Des Jardins
Author and media strategist Jory Des Jardins is president of strategic alliances for BlogHer, Inc. Since co-founding BlogHer in 2005, Jory has developed strategic relationships with Fortune 1000 brands and led innovative campaigns to integrate contextual marketing and advertising into communities of women interested in every topic, from food, health and family to business, finance and technology. As an author and media strategist, Jory regularly writes on women's business issues, blogging, relationships and pop culture for such publications as Fast Company, The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Inc. Magazine, and her blog, Pause. She's also written for Sports Illustrated for Women, Working Woman, USA Today Magazine, Good Housekeeping, The New York Times and edited for The New York Times Syndicate and Time Inc.'s Custom Publishing Division. Jory has helped high-technology start-ups Pluck and Rojo launch successful blog syndication initiatives and produced Third Age's successful network of bloggers. In addition to her personal blog, Jory blogs about personal career growth and entrepreneurship on BlogHer.
Kalyn Denny
Kalyn Denny is a retired teacher who writes the award-winning food blog Kalyn's Kitchen and also writes about food at BlogHer.com and other places on the web. Kalyn started her blog when people were asking for her low-glycemic recipes and she needed a place to store the recipes online. Her brother Rand changed her life by saying "Why don't you start a blog?" Now Kalyn is active and involved in a world-wide community of food bloggers. You can find her on Flickr, Del.icio.us, Facebook, and Twitter. Kalyn has participated in previous BlogHer panels about How Social Media Can Save Dinner (BlogHer Boston '08) and The Art of Foodblogging (BlogHer '07). She was also a speaker at SXSW '08 about Secrets of Successful Food Blogging. Kalyn's Kitchen won a Food Blog Award in 2006 for Best Food Blog - Theme, and her blog has received numerous mentions in magazines, newspapers, and on the web. Before blogging, Kalyn served as full-time President of the Davis Education Association, and was on the board of Directors of the Utah Education Association and the National Education Association. She has been featured in Who's Who Among American Teachers, and was included in the Davis School District Teacher Hall of Fame.
Lisa C. Johnson
In April 2006, Lisa Johnson aka “Anali” created her blog Anali’s First Amendment, and she’s been blogging ever since. While visiting her blog, she might: walk with you around her Quincy neighborhood; tell you about her family and friends; share a favorite movie, book, or restaurant; or drive you to Boston in her Beetle. She could also start talking politics. Or really just about anything. So, what’s the constant? Food. Always food. She believes in homemade food and cooking from scratch. Okay, let’s be real. You won’t find many salads on her blog. Some soups yes, but it’s usually baking rather than cooking. Cakes, cupcakes, cookies, muffins, scones, biscuits, breads; you name it. If it’s made in the oven and has some sweetness, you can probably find it on her blog. But to Lisa, a recipe is merely a guide and not to be strictly construed. She truly enjoys taking a recipe and adapting it to her tastes and to what she happens to have in the house. Lisa is also a freelance writer, amateur photographer, and attorney. She has a B.A. in Psychology from Brandeis University and a J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law.
Lisa Stone
Lisa Stone
Co-Founder
The originator of BlogHer, journalist and blogger Lisa Stone leads product development and works across the organization as CEO to advocate for bloggers and partners that fulfill our vision. Before BlogHer.com and BlogHerAds.com, Lisa helped launch three sponsored blogging networks: American Lawyer Media| Law.com's legal blog network (2004), Knight Ridder Digital's Thatsracin.com (2005), and Glam Media (2005). Previously, while executive producer and Editor in Chief/VP, Programming for Women.com (acquired by iVillage in 2001), Lisa launched an 18-channel network and helped grow it to a Top 30 site, overseeing all original content programming and newsletters, including a team of 25 and an annual budget of $3 MM. She launched successful online networks and interactive programming for many national brands, including Hearst and Rodale magazines, E! Television/Online, HBO's Sex and the City and Bloomberg. Her team's best-known work included Bachelors of Silicon Valley, The Women.com | Bloomberg Index, R U A 10? and Majority 2000, an election initiative with Good Housekeeping, Gallup and CBS Good Morning America. Lisa has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Oakland Tribune, Publisher's Weekly and Frommer's, among other publications. She is the first internet journalist awarded a Nieman Fellowship by Harvard University. Lisa's personal blog, Surfette, began as an extension of her 2004 convention blog for the Los Angeles Times. Lisa also blogs on BlogHer, often on politics and media.
Lydia Walshin

A professional food writer for more than 20 years, Lydia is an award-winning former columnist for Rhode Island Monthly magazine. She teaches classes in Providence for Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) on topics ranging from tagine cooking to tapas, and offers private cooking classes in her own kitchen.

Author of South End Cooks: Recipes from a Boston Neighborhood, a cookbook that raised funds for three local agencies (community garden, food pantry, and home-delivered meals for seniors), she is a long-time activist in the hunger relief community and former advisory council member of Share Our Strength's Operation Frontline program in Boston. Currently she is working with a group of restaurant professionals, nonprofit agencies and state health officials to re-establish Operation Frontline in Rhode Island. 

In 2002 Lydia began a cookies-for-donation program, and in 2007, with the help of the food blogging community, she began to replicate the program around the country. Drop In & Decorate Cookies for Donation is now a 501c3 tax-exempt nonprofit organization that has donated nearly 10,000 cookies to 56 nonprofit agencies serving basic human needs, and food bloggers in 17 states, Canada, Germany and India have hosted Drop In & Decorate® events.

In June 2006 Lydia opened the doors of The Perfect Pantry, where she blogs about the everyday and unusual items in her own pantry, with recipes, food lore, and practical tips for how to use each ingredient.

Matt Armendariz
Matt Armendariz is a Los Angeles based food photographer, art director, graphic designer and blogger. His food blog, Mattbites.com, began in 2005 as a way to share his behind the scenes moments in the food industry as well as his passion for food, drink and everything in between. Recognized by numerous publications, editors and writers as well as appearances on The Martha Stewart Show and Good Bite, Mattbites was named as one of the Top 50 Food Blogs in the world by London Times Online.

He lives in Los Angeles with his partner Adam Pearson, a food stylist, and three incredibly small dogs.
Michelle Lentz

Michelle is the owner of Write Technology, a social media consulting and instructional design firm in the Cincinnati area. As a social media consultant, she helps companies find ways to integrate Web 2.0 into their training and their marketing. Taking advantage of her training skills, she offers several seminars on using social media in business, whether it's social media 101, content in blogging, or even microblogging for your business. You can find her overactive Twitter profile @writetechnology.

Michelle serves as Technology/PR chair for the Krystal Pepper Memorial Scholarship, a charity in memory of her younger sister. She maintains four weblogs and is over-connected in social media. Michelle is also a contributing writer for Brian Solis's Bub.blicio.us social economy blog.

Michelle's favorite thing? Writing, talking, and downright enjoying food and wine. Visit her award-winning wine blog at wine-girl.net.

Ree Drummond

Ree Drummond started Confessions of a Pioneer Woman in her pajamas in 2006. Now, ThePioneerWoman.com has become a catch all for Ree's step-by-step recipes, photography tutorials, homeschooling discussion, and stories of her transition from spoiled city girl to domestic ranch wife.

In 2009, The Pioneer Woman took home Bloggie awards for Best Photography, Best Design, and Weblog of the Year. Ree lives on a working cattle ranch in Oklahoma with her husband "Marlboro Man" and their four children.

Sean Timberlake

BlogHer's Product Director Sean Timberlake and his photographer husband DPaul Brown are the dynamic duo behind the San Francisco-centric food blog Hedonia. 

Susan Russo

Susan Russo is a free lance food writer in San Diego. She publishes stories, recipes and photos on her cooking blog, Food Blogga, which is considered the "Best of the Food Blogs" by MSN's Delish.com and was featured as the "Blog of the Day" on the Julie & Julia movie website. 

Susan has two upcoming cookbooks which will be released in the fall of 2010 by Quirk Books. She is also a regular contributor to NPR’s Kitchen Window.

Susan lives, cooks, and eats in a condo in beautiful downtown San Diego. She lives with her husband Jeff, a dermatologist, who insists she always wear sunglasses and carry a sun-screen of 30 SPF at all times. When she isn't writing about her Italian-American family back in Rhode Island or life with her husband in sunny Southern California, she can be found milling around a local farmers’ market buying a lot more food than two people could possibly eat.

Susan can be found on Twitter @foodblogga.

Valerie Harrison
Valerie Harrison is an avid food blogger who has called More Than Burnt Toast home for the past two years. She lives and works in the Okanagan Valley in the interior of British Columbia, Canada. "On October 16th I held an event for World Food Day on my blog, which is one day set aside by the World Food Program, a division of the United Nations, to highlight the crisis of famine. This ultimately led me to form a partnership with Giz of Equal Opportunity Kitchen to see what we could do the other 364 days of the year. We created our network BloggerAid-Changing the Face of Famine, which partnered with the WFP and their School Meals program, to create a community of like-minded individuals who also have a commitment to make a difference and raise awareness.

As our first project we have created a cookbook of a compilation of recipes from 137 bloggers the world over and available on Amazon later this year. The cookbook will be marketed worldwide and speaks to the pride and sense of ownership that our members have when they've contributed something personal with an original recipe in aid of famine.

We have also developed a community "View & Review" within our network where we review cookbooks and products provided by a wide range of publishers and companies worldwide. We like the combination with activism and the whole "giving and receiving" philosophy that results. I think we've proven that we can attract participation and still have a great deal of fun along the way!!
 
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