My friend Gwendolyn recently started a food blog entitled Patent and the Pantry. She’s combining recipes with great photos of her concoctions. She brought a bunch of rosemary cashews when she came to visit us, and they were very tasty:
Rosemary Cashews have rapidly become my go-to hostess gift since I began making them a few years ago. They have been to book club and video nights, served as work snacks and traveled all the way to Malta as a small, homemade gift for friends hosting me there. (They were such a hit, we made a bastardized version for Canadian Thanksgiving, in which my friends invited 10 for turkey dinner by the pool.)
I love the play of salty and sweet and the hit of heat, combined with the herby woodiness of the rosemary. Plus they’re ridiculously easy to make.
My only tip for Gwen is that she ought to host (and tag and add to groups) her photos on Flickr, and include links back to the appropriate blog posts in the description field. That will likely drive some traffic, given how attractive they are.
A couple of weeks ago, thanks to Christine, I discovered Rouxbe, a great-looking recipe site with really slick videos. More importantly, I showed it to the chef and gourmand in our family, Julie.
She signed up for the trial membership, and remarked that Rouxbe’s was “the most graceful sign up process I’ve ever seen.” Subsequently I’ve been the lucky recipient of several Rouxbe-powered meals. Tonight we had pan-fried dott (possibly the Maltese word for ‘halibut’) with a cilantro orange cumin dressing and rockin’ Moroccan couscous.
A while back I watched a Rouxbe video to learn the correct method of shelling (shucking? skinning?) prawns. I was super-impressed by the broadcast quality of the videos–it’s some of the best I’ve seen on the web.
You can’t embed their videos (which isn’t ideal nor surprising, as they’re widescreen), but I did find this little trailer on YouTube:
Julie’s sold, and is going to sign up for a year’s subscription. 15% of the US $49 yearly fee goes to feed children in developing nations. Don’t have the forty-nine bucks? They’ll try and find you a sponsor:
It works like this. You tell us what interests you have in the food and culinary world. We try and match you up with a sponsoring company that will pay your way on Rouxbe…
But wait, isn’t this just an ad? Here’s the difference. There are no large or expanding banner ads, no 15 or 30 second ads before or during the content and no pop-ups on Rouxbe. Remember, at Rouxbe the food is the celebrity. This will never change. We promise. Sponsors get to put their logo on the page and are able to provide links to their offerings, but our goal is that these links will be contextual to you and will never interfere with your cooking experience on Rouxbe.
Hey Rouxbe, if you need someone to help you with blogger outreach and online marketing, drop us a line. You’re the sort of company we love to work for.
