Things have been very quiet on The Gourmet Project front recently. Now that preparation for, and recovery from our wedding are over with, I’m ready to get back to The Project. We had a spectacular day and a great party with excellent food, free-flowing wine, and a cupcake wedding cake. It’s official, we’re now dining companions for life.
Look for regular updates from here on out.
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I’ve had a horrible case of bloggers block this summer. The enormity of my recipe backlog is paralyzing me, and I haven’t been able to wait it out. The solution as I see it is to shake things up. I’m moving to much leaner posts, more frequently, so that I can blow through this backlog, and get things back to normal. I’m usually too wordy anyway, so forced concision could be a good thing. Thanks for sticking with me through the long periods of blog silence around here.
*comic courtesy of xkcd
Sorry for the blog silence. I just got back from a week at the beach. Our place was supposed to have internet access, but didn’t.
Extra Extra! There’s an article about cook-though blogs like this one in today’s Wall Street Journal. There’s even a quote from me in there. This is the first mainstream media attention The Project has attracted, and I’m honoured to have it come from such a prestigious publication. You can access the article through the WSJ website, there’s also a page of links with excerpts from the cook-through blogs profiled. I discovered a bunch of amazing new blogs, it’s well worth a look.
I was just googling for an online version of a recipe from The Book, and lo-and-behold I discovered another version of The Project. I’ve known about Teena’s take on The Project since I started writing this blog, but I was surprised to discover that Melissa at Cooking Gourmet has been blogging her way through The Book too. She’s been at it since March 2007, and it looks like she’s done about the same number of recipes as I have. Definitely worth checking out. So, are there any other versions of The Project out there? What about other “cook my way through a whole cookbook” blogs worth reading? I’ve been following Carol’s ode to Thomas Keller with her French Laundry at Home project, anyone else I should know about?
Happy Birthday Gourmet Project!
On Thursday March 6th The Gourmet Project had its first birthday, and I forgot to mark the occasion.
I’ve been having a wonderful time cooking, photographing, and writing the blog and I’ve been thrilled with the steady growth in readership over the past year. My first month out the site had 142 unique visitors, while last month 4575 of you came by. I’ve really enjoyed interacting with all of you in the comments, and I’ve been especially pleased to hear back from those of you who’ve tried some of the recipes.
A Birthday is a good time for a little state of the blog update. With 149 recipes written-up I’ve maintained a pace of 2.8 recipes / week, and completed 11.5% of the project. At this rate I’ll be finished on Dec 1st 2015. All in all I don’t think I’m doing too badly. I still have a serious backlog of recipes to plow through, and it’s growing rather than shrinking. I’ve grown to appreciate the time between cooking and writing which allows me to mull the recipes over. But, in my ideal world, I’d only leave a couple of weeks lag, the present 3 months is too much.
Over the year the blog itself has been upgraded with features like categories, tagging, comment management, sharing on social networks, statistics, and progress tracking, which hopefully make the site a lot more useful. We’re looking into adding new features in the next little while. I’m planning on making my trek through the book more seasonal and thematic in the coming year, and focusing on some of those chapters that I’ve been neglecting.
It’s been a great year, and I hope you’ll join me for eight more.
* The lovely birthday cake photo is courtesy of Pinkcakebox’s excellent CC licensed photostream on flickr
Now that we’ve had a chance to tell close friends in person, I can tell you wonderful people who follow The Project, that my dining companion has agreed to become my wife. I proposed on New Year’s Eve up in the mountains, at the ski cabin we were staying in. We were about to sit down to a beef tenderloin feast her father had spent the afternoon preparing, and I pulled her out onto the balcony and proposed. After establishing that, yes I was serious, and no, this wasn’t a joke, she said yes.
Happy Holidays,
After great visits with family and friends over the past few days, I’m heading off to the airport to join my dining companion and her family for a ski vacation. I’ll have plenty of time to relax and write about food, but only sporadic internet access. Look for updates in batches between here and Jan 8th.
During last year’s ski getaway my dining companion’s family asked me to cook something, and this is what I did.
wish me better luck this time around!
All the best to you and yours,
KC
Check it out! I’m 10% of the way through The Project. Just 1164 more recipes to go.
Check out the new Tags Page on the sidebar which includes the brand new tag cloud, and rank orders for the tags. I hope these will make it easier to browse the recipes by ingredient, season, cooking technique, serving situation, holiday etc. If you want to suggest a tag for a post, by all means leave a comment and I’ll update it.