other food blogs

Yesterday, I had the opportunity of visiting the World Headquarters of Serious Eats in New York. What a great place it is.

One of my favorite food blogs is back!

Rebecca Blood, one of my favorite (non-food/general) bloggers, has started an interesting challenge: eating for a month organically on a U.S. Food Stamp budget. Naturally she is blogging the experience. Given the current ongoing discussions in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere about the cost of eating ethically, let alone organically, it's a very timely experiment. Rebecca's budget for 2 is "$74.00/week or 320.80/month, the USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] 'Thrifty' standard for a family of 2 adults, aged 20-50 years."

(My only very minor nitpick would be that Rebecca lives in the Bay Area, which has to be one of the easiest places in the world to conduct such an experiment. :) Now I'd like to see a similar one by a blogger in say, Iceland. Any takers? )

I received a lovely email from Myriam of Once Upon A Tart, a beautiful food blog unknown to me up until now. I should have, since she is a food blogger in Zürich - just a few kilometers (or miles, whatever) away from where I sit now. This did get me thinking though about Swiss food bloggers - or to be strict about it, food bloggers who write from Switzerland. (The very popular 1x umrühen bitte is written from Andalusia, Spain I think.)

People email me about their food sites and blogs all the time. I don't mention those that I don't find interesting or think would interest any Just Hungry readers, but here are a couple that came in recently that did catch my eye.

• Foodtripper is a new site that reviews restaurants and food shops. What makes it stand out in this very crowded category is that they seem to have a European outlook on things, that aren't limited to the usual places. I found several unusual and intriguing places listed, such as a restaurant in Pompeii that takes its inspiration from ancient Roman cuisine (though hopefully they don't have authentic garum) and a chestnut factory in southwestern France.
• If you're visiting a major food-obsessed city where you don't know anyone, finding your way around can be a bit daunting. A culinary tour may be one way to get your bearings. Zerve.com offers walking and noshing tours of New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and New Orleans. If anyone's gone on one of their tours I'd be interested to hear your impressions.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community (EEC), which lead to the formation of the European Union. Over the weekend they had a big party in Berlin, where among other things they sampled two traditional cakes from all EU member countries. Here is the official list of cakes.

Natalia has the roundup for Food Destinations #5 up on her blog now - go and check it out!

If you are planning a St. Patrick's Day feast but still haven't decided what to make, European Cuisines has been posting a new real Irish recipe every day since the beginning of the month. There's everything from colcannon to Irish Stew to boxty (potato pancakes) to crubeens, which are "crunchy Irish pig's trotters", and a whole lot more. They also have a rant about how corned beef is definitely not the Irish national dish. I wasn't planning on anything Irish myself this weekend, but those, um, crunchy pig's trotters sound interesting.... [via Diane].

I haven't updated the expat food blogroll for a while, but I've just added three new ones: please check out the original expat food blogroll post, as well as the right sidebar on the front page.

Remember, if you are an expat food blogger and you want to be added to the blogroll please just leave a comment on that post or contact me.

I often find blogs that are new to me via my referer logs. If I see an unfamiliar URL, I will usually go and check it out. (I'm much less likely to go check out a site that's just emailed to me, so the best way to get my attention is just to link to this site somewhere.) I've discovered quite a lot of great food blogs that aren't that well known yet that way.

One thing that isn't always on some new blogs is an about page. I would really love to know even a little about who is behind the blog. It doesn't have to be as long as the one on this site but - just a little bit. Like, where do you live? Where are you from? Who do you cook for, and why? What do you like to cook or eat? Why did you start a food blog? What's the objective of your site? Just a couple from that list would really bring your blog to life for readers.