Dear Readers and Toronto Food Bloggers,
While I've enjoyed putting together Blog-A-Log every week for the past 2 and a half years, there's now so many posts each week that the task has become overwhelming.
Which means that this will be the last Blog-A-Log column.
That doesn't mean we're going to stop reading or linking to great posts by Toronto food bloggers. Instead, we'll be selecting a few interesting posts each day and will be adding them to our daily news round-up column, What's Cooking.
We know that each and every blogger has a different attitude towards the art of blogging - some only want to post recipes, others only want to write about food politics, while still others concentrate on restaurant reviews. But we believe, what with the recent events surrounding the demise of Gourmet magazine (and subsequent squabbles on the role that bloggers play), as well as the decision by the US Federal Trade Commission regarding disclosure of promotional items, that it's time to start considering bloggers as real media, and for bloggers to start looking at what they do in a more professional light.
As such, we will now be including notable blog posts alongside those of more mainstream media. This makes for a much more timely link referral, but also means that we'll be looking at every post with an even more critical eye for a quality of writing that is on par with the professionals. Many of Toronto's food bloggers already achieve that and we'll be looking forward to reading your posts and sharing them with our readers.
- Beer, Beats and Bites - maybe now that it's fall, we can stop with the crappy lime beer.
- Blog From Our Kitchen - smoked pork braised in beer.
- Closet Cooking - sweet potato pecan pie is like two pies in one.
- Food With Legs - checking out the Burger Bar; gotta say that the idea of cheeseburger spring rolls scares the heck outta me.
- Foodpr0n - have macarons, will travel. Those lovely airy little cookies can be shipped if they're packed well.
- Fork in Food - the joy of a new kitchen appliance. Anyone want to start a pool and place bets as to when Screamin' Mama gets really sick of waffles?
- Get the Foodie 411 - Am deeply fascinated, but also a little weirded out by these pancake breakfast muffins with bacon.
- Ginger Rose - storing and growing herbs in winter.
- Gothic Epicures VinCuisine - Dean recommends some food and wine books for fall.
- La Boheme Cherie - comforting apple squares.
- Living in the Kitchen With Puppies - reviewing Lucy Waverman's A Year in Lucy's Kitchen.
- On the Road With the Grape Guy - a recap of Savour Stratford.
- Recipes For Trouble - Marusya writes my favourite Thanksgiving post of the year (and notably the only one to make the list), about being grateful.(I'm grateful that it doesn't include directions on how to truss a turkey or a recipe for cranberry chutney.)
- Toronto Vegetarian - checking out Megas, where there are plenty of vegetarian options, but you don't always get what you ordered.
- Vegan Cookbook Critic - baking vegan dog biscuits.
- Welcome to the World of Ontario Wine - no, it really is okay to pair red wine with white meat.
I'll miss it but I never understood how you could do it with all the time it consumes. I tried doing a daily link round up and it worked for awhile (while I had a full time job, oddly) but eventually got overwhelmed by the number of feeds that I subscribe to and the resulting posts. I figured that you must be superhuman. :)
Another idea is to have other writers do the feature, maybe 5-7, one person per day, but you might have already considered that.
Not superhuman - just super-organized - and picky. For Food For Thought on Save Your Fork, I go through about 200 posts a day, but keep maybe 15. You just have to make a point of not reading everything to see if it's worthwhile.And know what you want and don't want - ie. not including recipes allows me to automatically rule out 40 - 50% of the stuff in that folder.
We had another writer doing blog-a-log for a while but it overwhelmed her and she made me take it back. And since most of our writers have other jobs or gigs, they usually don't have the time to do stuff same day. It needs someone dedicated to it, who can make time for it every day.
I too will miss this handy weekly list of other Toronto blogs. And I too completely understand that there are too many too keep up with. I confess that I was lazily letting you do the previewing work.
Good idea to add the blog-posts to the "What's Cooking?" section.
Elizabeth - our list of Toronto area bloggers on our Links page will still be maintained. You can always go there and check out blogs manually. Or add them to an RSS feed.