Food Blogs

As you can see on my blog roll, I read a lot of blogs. Actually, there are still more that I read and haven't listed there, yet. I joke with my husband that Google reader is like my daily newspaper, as I sit with my phone and coffee in hand (since the computer is usually occupied,) catching up on all the posts I've yet to read. I mainly read design, DIY or just plain old lifestyle blogs. Well, I've just changed the makeup of my Google reader significantly because babble.com posted their list of Top 100 Food Mom blogs for 2011. And I've just spent the last hour and a half going through and looking at almost.every.one. 

A few disclaimers here: 

1. It's naptime. (In fact, I just realized that I'm the only one in the house not sleeping. 

2. My house is (relatively) clean. 

3. I've already made blueberry muffins for breakfast and a huge pot of pasta y fagioli is simmering away on the stove for dinner.

I think I deserved the "me" time, don't you?

If you know me personally, you know that I'm not the cook of the house. That is usually left up to Johnny, who can take what we have in the house and turn it into a decent delicious dinner. He throws ingredients and spices around without measuring, and it always comes out tasting amazing. A baker; however, he is not. That's where I come in. I'd like to say (and I've been told) that I'm a good baker, but the hubs ALWAYS teases me because I have to measure every.single.ingredient.precisely. AND follow a recipe. Duh, how else do you think I get the cookies to come out perfectly??? I do like to think, and Johnny will also attest to the fact that I can follow any recipe, whether a dinner or dessert, and I have an albeit small, but really good collection of specialties, mostly taken from my grandmother's old wooden recipe box. (Like the pasta y fagioli currently cooking on the stove, homemade sauce, beef stew, etc. I just noticed these are all rainy day/Sunday recipes.) 

And beyond what I know, I love looking for new recipes to try. Sometimes I just hand them off to Johnny who executes them with his own personal flair, or I make them, fastidiously following the recipe. Either way, they usually come out pretty good, and we find new favorites to add to our dinner rotation. 

So, going back to babble's list, I went through the list rather quickly, reading their overview of each blog, clicking on most of the links to at least see what the blog looked like, and adding it to my Google reader if it looked remotely interesting to me. I can always go back and "unsubscribe" later. I was happy to see that several that I already subscribe to made the list-Smitten Kitchen was #1, Pioneer Woman was #2, and Weelicious was # 74! 

Hopefully my non-mom and male friends are still reading, because although these were the Top 100 Food "mom" blogs, very few of them were centered on cooking for children. The main focus of all of them was cooking good food, simply. I noticed several were created as a result of a child's food allergy, so there were some focused on that, including gluten-free lifestyles. There were also vegetarian/vegan blogs (which I still ended up subscribing to because their recipes looked amazing even though I'm not vegetarian,) and several centered on buying fresh and local products/supporting local farms. 

I obviously found many of them to be interesting, because I subscribed to at least 30 new blogs, and my reader currently has 242 unread items as a result. So, all you cooks, chefs, and food-lovers out there, I hope you enjoy this list as much as I did! 

Enjoy what's left of your weekend...Finnboo is all better, so back to school we go tomorrow!