Simply Breakfast – Jennifer Causey loves cooking up breakfast dishes as much as she loves talking pictures, and that’s how this food-photography blog came about. If you want to expand your morning meal repertoire, Simply Breakfast is rich with new, healthy (for the most part) and yummy breakfast ideas you will love. No wonder this blog is one of the Weekly Blog winners. My only complaint is that I wish Jennifer would have made her breakfast recipes available – they’re too delicious to look at!
To learn more about Jennifer and her work as a photographer, click here to get to her professional site. If food is what you’re after, see the image below of my personal favorite breakfast ever!
That’s Chic – Style galore is what lies behind the That’s Chic blog title. Rachel Nguyen is a model-icious young woman from California who lives and breathes style and aesthetics. Whether it’s the amazing clothes she wears to the pretty photographs she takes of moments in her life, Rachel invites us to explore her exquisite taste.
Each post is a well-written account of Rachel’s recent events, and includes large photos of Rachel, chic as ever. In addition to clothes, accessories and home design you will find food related posts with mouth-watering photos. That’s Chic is one of last week’s Weekly Blog winners, and here’s a photo that shows you why (click the image to read the full post).
You Grow Girl – To me, gardening always seemed to be a field too complex to understand, let alone implement at home. My mother is an avid gardener who actually knows by heart the Latin taxonomy of many East Coast plants and trees., which kind of puts me to shame, but now with Weekly Blog winner You Grow Girl, all that is about to change!
This wonderful gardening community, created by Gayla Trail back in 2000, is a “contemporary, laid-back approach to organic gardening” you should definitely explore, particularly if your green patch is spatially-challenged (i.e. the size of a closet). Find lots of gardening ideas you can implement at home, including produce you can grow and eat! Here is a good example:
Nowness – This is a Weekly Blog winner for a good reason: it’s a sophisticated Web storyteller, meaning it offers a regularly updated dose of the coolest and most chic stories currently circulating the Web. Claiming to be “the digital leader in luxury storytelling,” Nowness is the creation of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, which explains its posh appearance while its content is editorially independent.
Each story or post concerns the creative world (fashion, design, film, gastronomy), and is accompanied by large high-quality photos and videos. As the reader you are encouraged to vote for each post, by clicking ‘Love’ or ‘Don’t Love.’ I just adored Il Pellicano: Tuscan Paradise (see screenshot below), and I feel this is but one example of the semi-infinite wonder you will find here on Nowness.
Macheesmo – What happens when you take tested recipes, add clearly presented how-to instructions made easy, and throw in high resolution yummy photos? You get this Weekly Blog winner, Macheesmo, written and cooked up by food savvy Nick, who is eager to share his kitchen adventures. One thing Macheesmo helped me master in the kitchen is preparing home-made lasagna, which always seemed like a daunting task. Thanks, Nick! This was a real treat! Click the image below to get to the full post, and browse the huge collection of other recipes available on Macheesmo.
Cupcakes and Cashmere – This delightful blog- a winning Weekly Blog here on All My Faves- combines sophisticated style with inspiring home decor tips and savory recipes. Yes, the top fashion-home-kitchen content is well represented in Cupcakes and Cashmere and Emily, the gorgeous woman behind it, does an excellent job at creating top quality content (that includes photography).
The style theme in Cupcakes and Cashmere consists of Emily’s regularly updated photos of herself, cleverly dressed in a different outfit each time. She also points to makeup and cosmetic must-haves, which is always a nice thing to have to keep up with the latest trends. Start exploring the wonders of Cupcakes and Cashmere, and be sure to check out the How-To page which I found extremely useful (thanks Emily!). Click on the images below to go to these favorite posts:
They Draw & Cook – Brother and sister Nate and Salli are a wonderful talented team of design and illustration. What started out as an effort to recreate a tasty dish they had during a vacation soon sprung into Nate and Salli’s amazingly creative illustrated recipe blog, They Draw & Cook. Text based recipes are fine if you are already familiar with the dish. If you’re a first timer however, the text-only list of ingredients and how-to is downright boring and lacks that pizazz I’m often relying on to get me into the cooking groove.
They Draw & Cook is all about putting lots of color and good vibes into cooking, as the blog’s recipe collection offers illustrated recipes that take the cooking experience to a whole new level. Here are a few examples (click the image to see the full recipe in larger size):
Can’t get enough? Find another recipe. Is one of your kids an avid kitchen helper? Try out the Kids Draw & Cook. To submit your own recipe and artowrk, click here.
Tasting Table – I am usually weary of sites that work on an email newsletter-only basis rather than offering open, surfable pages. Tasting Table is an exception to this rule of thumb of mine. This food savvy hot spot offers a daily serve of “one delicious idea about dining, wine, cocktails, cooking or restaurant personalities. We feed you only first-hand recommendations that we have tested thoroughly ourselves—one bite at a time.”
Tasting Table is a refreshing take on gastronomic and recipes recommendations online, and it currently covers the culinary arenas of NYC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC and San Francisco. Hopefully with time Tasting Table will offer the same superb food & wine content for other cities as well. Either way, I am subscribed. Here’s an example of one of the daily emails I received from Tasting Table (my apologies for the incomplete image, the full recipe is below):
Turnip and Rutabaga Gratin
Recipe adapted from Steven Satterfield, Miller Union, Atlanta
Yield: 6 side-dish servings
INGREDIENTS:
1 medium rutabaga (about ¾ pound), peeled and thinly sliced
1 teaspoon thyme leaves
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more for buttering the baking dish
1 medium purple turnip (about ¾ pound), peeled and thinly sliced
2 cups bread crumbs, preferably homemade
1 cup chicken stock, preferably homemade
1 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
DIRECTIONS
1. Preheat the oven to 450˚ and lightly butter an 8-by-8-by-2-inch baking dish.
2. Arrange a thin, even layer of the rutabaga slices across the bottom of the dish. Sprinkle with a pinch of thyme, salt and pepper, then dot with tiny pats of the butter. Arrange a thin, even layer of turnip slices over the rutabaga. Sprinkle with thyme, salt and pepper and dot with more butter. Continue the layering process, alternating between the rutabaga and turnip, until the dish is approximately two-thirds full and all the vegetables have been included.
3. Season the bread crumbs with salt and black pepper and spread over the vegetables. Pour the chicken stock and cream over the bread crumbs; press down on the bread crumbs gently to absorb the liquids. Drizzle with the olive oil.
4. Bake until the gratin is golden brown and the vegetables in the center of the dish are tender when poked with a paring knife, about 35 minutes. Remove the gratin from the oven and let rest for 20 minutes, then serve.
Yumm! – This site offers a most productive tool for cooks all over. Instead of subscribing to various food blogs and sites on the Web, Yumm! invites you to have all of your favorite recipes in one place, and also gives you the option of sharing these with friends!
I gave Yumm! a try and loved it. It certainly makes online recipe management a breeze. In addition, you can browse Yumm!’s recipe collection and find your next perfect dish right here. I explored the site’s most active section, which is where I found the mouth-watering Oreo Cheesecake Cupcakes. Click the image to go to the recipe.
Foodily – This easy to use food search engine brings you relevant search results from all over the Web, regardless of what recipe you are looking for. Not only that, Foodily also suggests related searches and lets you go social with what you find. Foodily describes itself as “the world’s largest recipe network, bringing together recipes from across the web so you can compare any recipe and find the ones your friends like.”
I tested the Foodily service, and I must admit, I was impressed. I started out with a rather simple search for ‘tart.’ Look what some of the results look like.
I then went on to search for a more obscure, yet a personal favorite dish – Kimchee (spicy pickled Napa cabbage with lots of chili flakes, a signature Korean dish). Foodily presented me with a large variety of results and I was delighted to add some inspiring recipes to my repertoire. Great site for food and recipes!
Jelly Shot Taste Kitchen – What started out as a medium to keep friends and family updated on their new jelly shot endeavors soon became the super cute and tasty blog, Jelly Shot Test Kitchen. The two sisters behind the colorful jelly drinks, Michelle and Amy, work wonders and take jelly to a whole new level, and this blog documenting their creations was picked as one of the Weekly Blog winners.
The photos you will find on Jelly Shot Test Kitchen (plus recipes of course) are so beautiful I feel taking a bite off of these would be a crime, virtually destroying a masterpiece. I will let the photos speak for themselves. Click on the images to go to their respective post and recipe, and you will then understand why this blog was mentioned in gourmet magazines such as Saveur.com.
Santa’s Hat Jelly Shot:
P.S. The Jelly Shot Test Kitchen recipe book will be released by Running Press in May 2011.
Orangette – I just love it when a cooking blog is able to not only produce refreshing and inspiring recipes on a regular basis, but to keep doing it for years. The Web is full of cooking blogs, some of which are in my personal RSS list, but only a few are able to keep their top-notch content year in, year out. Ornagette is one of those selected few, and it scored lots of visits while it was featured as a Weekly Blog.
Written by the lovely Molly Wizenberg who has also published the fantastic book, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table (Simon & Schuster, 2009, available at Amazon), Orangette’s first post was published back in 2004. The blog is packed with my favorite cooking blog must-have elements: beautifully written content, mouth-watering recipes, and stunning photos (taken by Molly herself!). See the pics below and click them to get to their respective posts: Whole Wheat Sablés with Cacao Nibs and Plum Crumble, respectively.
