Elise Bauer

Cross-posted at Simply Recipes  My mother is one of those intuitive cooks in the kitchen. 73 years old, and having raised six kids, she doesn't follow recipes anymore. If you watch her while she cooks, the timing just appears to happen seamlessly. Whereas I'm good for only making one dish at a time, mom can coordinate a whole meal for 8 - a main course protein, one or two veggie sides, a starch, and a salad - without getting remotely flustered. She's always tasting whatever she is cooking, and adjusting the seasonings. She cooks from memory and a well developed sense of what works together well, and how flavors come in balance.  Read more >

Growing up a city girl in Los Angeles, I was always fascinated by farms and orchards. I still have vibrant memories of picking pears and hunting rabbits in Antelope valley with my dad. Such a different world of nature than the manicured lawn of our home in the city. In our hectic modern lives we don't often stop to think where are food comes from. Who grew this tomato? Where did this chicken live, and how was it (she) housed?  Read more >

Google recently released a very cool new feature. Google is now letting us create our own custom search engines, based on a list of websites that we choose. I've started playing around with it here at FoodBlogSearch.com. I often like to link to other food blogs in my posts on my recipe blog and this custom search makes it easy to search the food blogs I frequent.  Read more >

Julia Child almost single-handedly introduced America to the art of French cooking, and taught a generation of women to cook in her PBS series, The French Chef. She would have been 94 today. In her honor, Lisa Morgan of Champaign Taste has kicked off an Annual Julia Child Birthday Celebration, encouraging food bloggers to cook a recipe from one of Julia's several cookbooks. Lisa kicks off the event with a Julia menu to drool over:  Read more >

This article is part of a series of posts on How to Build Blog Traffic (see Intro). When I first started blogging in 2003, I viewed the exercise mostly as a way to express myself. I didn't know what a "blogroll" was, nor did I care that much when I learned. Over the last few years I have found that the main distinction between a blog and any other website, other than diary-like entries, is the interconnectedness with other bloggers who care about the same things I do. It's being part of a community of other similarly interested people that make blogging so compelling. Engaging the community of people who care about the same things you do can exponentially enhance your blog's visibility. The following tips are obvious to me now, but weren't when I first started blogging:  Read more >