Junglefrog Cooking » blogging

The 7 links project – Looking back at history

Simone (junglefrog) — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 07:00:35 +0000

When I was invited by Jenn from Jenn Cuisine to take part in the 7 links project I said yes without thinking long and hard about it. I’ve been blogging now for three years (wow, has it really been that long??) and blogging in itself has brought me so many things. New friends and a whole community of wonderful people I would never have known if not for blogging, it taught me that food photography is really the thing I like most, it has improved massively on my web ‘designing skills (I know, being on wordpress is not really designing but at least now I understand a little bit about html and css codes… But I think above all, it helped me discover my true passion for food. I loved food before blogging, it’s not that I started blogging and all of a sudden realized ‘o, wait… cooking can actually be fun..’ No it wasn’t like that but it would not have learned the things I know today if not for blogging and reading all those foodie blogs out there.

The other day I was having dinner with two of my best friends and on the menu was an item called ‘Livar’. My friend looked at me slightly puzzled and asked if I knew what Livar was. Without any hesitation I could tell her that the name stands for Limburgs Varken (pig from Limburg) and shortened to Livar. I could have told her that the pig is a cloister pig and more such information that she didn’t want to know… So I kept it at the fact that it is really tasty pork meat… And she was utterly impressed that I even knew what it was. It’s just those little things that make you realize how much you’ve learned in those 3 years (and how much I still have to learn too!)

So looking back on my 3 year blogging history it’s quite fun to think of my best posts but difficult too! So many to choose from! 379 posts to be exact but I’ll give it a go! Here they are..

My most beautiful post

That was a difficult choice. Not that all my posts are utterly beautiful (I wish!) but because there are a lot of posts I have fond memories about for one reason or the other. The one I ended up picking was the one that got stuck in the back of my mind and it’s the post on lavender macarons that I made for Mac attack.

Beautiful macarons with feet

As anyone who has ever made macarons can tell you… it’s not so easy!! So when this batch came out I was over the moon thrilled that they looked so pretty. Do you notice those gorgeous little feet?

My most popular post

If most popular means the largest amount of comments left on a post then it is definitely my post on tiramisu for the Daring Bakers. I can still vividly remember this challenge as we had to make each component for the tiramisu from scratch.

Deliciously homemade tiramisu for the Daring Bakers

Yes, that also included the mascarpone!! It was a lot of work, although making the mascarpone turned out the be so much easier then I had thought it would be!! But still, while it was a fantastic challenge to do, making tiramisu this way was a one time adventure. There are many other ways of making tiramisu that are as tasty and soo much faster! As proven by my eggnog tiramisu and my limoncello one (technically called a trifle, but who’s counting right?). O and let’s not forget the special christmas tiramisu version we did last year. A bit heavy (understatement!!) but soooo good!

Most controversial post

Now there’s a tricky one… Initially I thought I had probably never done anything really controversial but then I started thinking back about that one post where I stated that the Dutch are seriously defeated when it comes to the making of ‘poffertjes’ by the Danish… There are several debates going on on the internet on the origin of poffertjes; some say it’s typical Dutch others say it’s typical Danish. I had taken it upon myself to find out the difference and that is when I discovered that yes, they are different and yes, the Danish ones are even better then our own ‘Oud Hollandsche’ poffertjes… There.. I said it again!

Bigger and better...

Technically the two are quite different; the Dutch version is flat and not filled and while enormously tasty and one of my favorites, the Danish ones called Aebleskiver are actually made in a totally different pan, with larger rounds. Because they are so big you can actually fill them with whatever you choose. I tried them with chocolate, banana, apples and loved them all! If you haven’t checked out the recipe and the requirements to make this mouthwatering beauties… Go and check it out here.

Most helpful post

Based on it’s popularity I would have to conclude that this must have been my post on controlling the light on your foodphotography (in a really basic way) There are many great foodblogs out there and there are also quite a few really good sites

Taken with SLR on 1/60s at f4.5 (manual) iso 640

that can teach you all about foodphotography and how to work with natural light vs artificial light so I merely tried to explain with a very simple example (aka my sandwich lunch) how I work most of the time. I think – as with many things in life – photography is a continuous learning process and I am still learning everyday. It also never hurts to look at how other people do their job. Where does the light come from? How did they create a certain mood and atmosphere? If you look for it there are lots of bloggers out there that give really good tips. Bring them all into practice and you’ll come a long way!

Surprising succes post

I had to think long and hard about this one as it always surprises me when a post is all of a sudden really popular but maybe even more so when the subject is entirely non food related. I think I was most warmly surprised by the responses when our two cats died at the ages of 21 and 20 yearsrespectively. I posted a little story after each post and all the responses I got where heart warming and I think in a large part show the strength of the blogging community. I was touched and

Witje

still am when I look at those messages. It’s good to know that there are people out there that care..

Joepie at 17 in the garden

Post that didn’t get the attention it deserves

Another hard one… I mean; what is the reason certain posts do really well and others do not? The recipe? The content or just the timing? I think most of it is usually due to timing and all of the above reasons too..lol… Good thing I don’t make a living with analyzing stuff.. I would be horrible at it.. As for the post I think deserves a little more attention is a gorgeous salad with asparagus and halloumi. Halloumi is one of my favorite cheeses and you will be able to find quite a few really good salad recipes which are featuring halloumi here too… But this one didn’t do so well, so if you haven’t checked it out? Now is the time!

Grilled asparagus with grilled haloumi and mustard dressing

To continue in this tradition I have invited 5 bloggers to share their 7 links with us as well. Go and check out there blogs; you’ll love it. And thanks again Jenn, for inviting me to take this trip down memory lane. It was fun!

Valerie from Love through the stomach

Marthe from Baking Blue Finger

Soma from Ecurry

Ishay from Food and the Fabulous

Valerie from The Chocolate Bunny

Metaphors, similes and what it’s all about…

Simone (junglefrog) — Thu, 26 May 2011 20:27:01 +0000

Tiny beads of sweat are starting to appear on my forehead as I toss in my bed under the warm duvet cover. I am fast asleep so unaware of the agonizing sounds I am making… “Caviar, black pearls, shiny, salty” I keep repeating words in my head that do not seem to make sense… I cannot get any sentence out of the jumble of letters and I start to panic. Then with a shock I sit up in bed and realize I was having a nightmare… I breathe a deep sigh of relief and manage to slow my heartbeat to a fairly normal flutter.

I sit up and try to remember the dream I was having just moments before; Jeanne and Jamie standing over me and looking very stern and serious with their fingers pointed at a blank piece of paper. A piece of paper I was supposed to have filled with some meaningful metaphors about caviar. A piece of paper that is yet to be written. I look to the left of the bed and see that my roommate Astrid is still fast asleep. We’re still at the plate to page workshop and the topic of today is going to be how to write for a magazine.

Different style, different context and different audience from a blog post. I prop the pillow up against the bedhead and sit up pondering on our days assignment. There are just a handful of people that know that I used to write before I took photos. When I was a kid I drove my parents crazy with my total book obsession; I read any time of the day and if I was curled up on the sofa with a good book, I shut out all other sounds in the room and concentrated purely on the book at hand. I kept reading when I needed to go upstairs or even when I needed to go to the bathroom. Book in hand and continue reading! All that reading at some point let me to start writing my own stories.

I loved to write; I still have my very first story on some crumbled pieces of paper. Don’t laugh as the story is about Simone and Ineke (my best friend at the time) in the Jungle (aha! It was Jungle then already… the source of Junglefrog!!) and I was this crazy kid who could talk to animals. I have no idea how the story unfolded but I was about 7 years old at the time, so let me tell you it was no literary masterpiece… This was also the time before the computer and so I did all my writing by hand, writing page after page on huge notebooks. I still have all of them today and some are actually quite funny (or at least I like to think so).

I wrote my first ‘novel’ before I was 20 years old. It was called Rainbow House and obviously was never published. It was a story set in a creepy old building in the South of England and the scene of a terrible horror story of which the details have sort of escaped me at this moment, but there was a dangerous ghost of some sorts that played the key role here as did the four girls that lived in the house. And it was not a small book either! 500 (typed) pages went into the book that got written and rewritten countless times. So many times in fact, that halfway through the book the plot got lost and time lines were completely messed up to never recover.

I remember following a course in creative writing and believe it or not, I am actually a copywriter (diploma and all) too… It’s just one of those things that I forgot about, never used again and I find that writing is like learning a new language; if you do not use it, the knowledge and the skill get lost over time.

Thinking about writing these past days during our writing assignments has brought all those memories back. The love I used to have for writing, the pleasure of just putting words to paper and coming up with a story. Plus I did write some pretty cool stuff twenty years ago. God, I used to write diaries about all my teenage loves and dramas. And yes, they all still exist somewhere in a crate upstairs. Stacked together. I kept writing diaries until I met a guy that didn’t respect my privacy, read and misused those journals and I stopped writing them since. I don’t miss the diary writing. I think that was useful when I needed it during the turbulent times of my life but now that I am older (o jeez, that sounds like I am 80 right now..) I don’t feel the need anymore to write about day to day life. Instead I write a blog, a blog about food predominantly and isn’t that a diary of sorts?

And then the thought about metaphors and similes comes back to me… I realize I am not good at using metaphors nor similes and I write pretty straightforward without a lot of adjectives. Is that good, is that bad? I don’t know but it’s just the way I know how to write.

I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and sneak out of the room for a quick shower before everyone else in the apartment wakes up. Another day at the Plate to Page workshop is about to start.

My one year anniversary!!

Simone (junglefrog) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:00:32 +0000

One year old!!

Sometimes it feels I’ve been blogging forever and sometimes it feels I only started it yesterday…. As it turns out today is my one year anniversary in blogging! I almost missed it but was reminded just in time by someone elses anniversary…

Looking back over the last 12 months it’s funny to see how it all changed. I think in the beginning I really had no clue what to write about; I moved blogging software twice in that period as well. Started on blogger, then on to typepad and now finally wordpress. I’m gonna stay here though…

I’ve met many amazing people in the foodie blog world and I still think it is incredible that there are so many talented people out there and being part of the blog-world is so much more fun than I initially thought!

Just for fun I wanted to post a really old foodphoto that I took about 4 years ago, just to see how horrible, horrible those were but as it happens I cleared up some of older discs just last week and I threw out all the old stuff that no one really needs, including… those very first foodshots! But as luck would have it I keep multiple backups so after some searching I found it back.

One of the very first foodphotos I took!! Isn't it terrible??

I am not sure what I was thinking when taking this terrible photo above, but it’s fun to see what the starting point was and where it went to from there, right?

Good thing I wasn’t blogging at that time!!

More catering plus…. new site!

Simone (junglefrog) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 09:26:45 +0000

Chicken curry with rice and beans

I know there are quite a lot of posts already on the site, but those have all been transferred from the ‘old’ blog, sooo.. this is the first official post from the brand new blog, which is still in the process of building. It’s the first time I am actually using specific software on my own domain and to be honest, I was very pleased with myself that I got everything to work yesterday! I am behind a computer a lot, so I do know something about it, but editing php or setting up database in MySQL stuff is not something I do on a regular basis, but thanks to the extensive manual from wordpress I managed! So now it’s still a lot of tweaking and customization of the site. Changing fonts (what do you think of the font?) and changing things around etc…

The above photo is another one that I did for the catering company this week; chickenfillet with green beans, curry and rice. It was a really hard dish to photograph and this was the angle that worked best. Still not my favorite of the day (those are the spareribs) but ok. The catering company is happy with it, which is the most important!

Back to editing the site now…:)

Foodbuzz Publisher Community Launches

Simone (junglefrog) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:16:12 +0000

A while ago – by mere accident – I stumbled upon this great site which is all about food bloggers and the community. Ofcourse I had to immediately sign up, even if I am a relatively new food-blogger they still welcomed me in with open arms. It's a fun site, so they have now officially launched their site so take a look around and get hooked!!

Here is the official announcement!

LAUNCH OF GLOBAL FOODBUZZ BLOGGER COMMUNITY

LEVERAGES REAL-PEOPLE, REAL-TIME POWER OF FOOD PUBLISHING

San Francisco – October 13, 2008: Foodbuzz, Inc., officially inaugurates its food blogger community with more than 1,000 blog partners, a global food blogging event and an online platform that captures the real-people, real-time power of food publishing in every corner of the world. At launch, the Foodbuzz community ranks as one of the top-10 Internet destinations for food and dining (Quantcast), with bloggers based in 45 countries and 863 cities serving up daily food content.

“Food bloggers are at the forefront of reality publishing and the dramatic growth of new media has redefined how food enthusiasts access tasty content,” said Doug Collister, Executive Vice President of Foodbuzz, Inc. “Food bloggers are the new breed of local food experts and at any minute of the day, Foodbuzz is there to help capture the immediacy of their hands-on experiences, be it a memorable restaurant meal, a trip to the farmers market, or a special home-cooked meal.”

Foodbuzz is the only online community with content created exclusively by food bloggers and rated by foodies. The site offers more than 20,000 pieces of new food and dining content weekly, including recipes, photos, blog posts, videos and restaurant reviews. Members decide the “tastiness” of each piece of content by voting and “buzz” the most popular posts to the top of the daily menu of submissions. Foodbuzz currently logs over 13 million monthly page views and over three million monthly unique visitors.

“Our goal is to be the number-one online source of quality food and dining content by promoting the talent, enthusiasm and knowledge of food bloggers around the globe,” said Ben Dehan, founder and CEO of Foodbuzz, Inc.

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The Foodbuzz blogger community is growing at a rate of 40 percent per month driven by strong growth in existing partner blogs and the addition of over 100 new blogs per month. “The Foodbuzz.com Web site is like the stock of a great soup. The Web site provides the base or backbone for bloggers to interact as a community, contribute content, and have that content buzzed by their peers,” said Mr. Dehan.

Global Blogging Event

Demonstrating the talent and scope of the Foodbuzz community, 24 Meals, 24 Hours, 24 Blogs offered online food enthusiasts an international, virtual street festival of food and diversity. The new feature showcased blog posts from 24 Foodbuzz partner bloggers chronicling events occurring around the globe during a 24 hour period andincluded:

Mid-Autumn Festival Banquest (New York, NY)

The "Found on Foodbuzz" 24-Item Tasting Menu (San Francisco, CA)

Aussie BBQ Bonanza – Celebrating Diversity (Sydney, Australia)

The Four Corners of Carolina BBQ Road Trip (Charleston, SC)

Criminal Tastes – An Illegal Supper (Crested Butte, CO)

From Matambre to Empanadas: An Argentine Dinner (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

A Sweet Trompe l’oeil (Seattle, WA)

“24 Meals, 24 Hours, 24 Blogs” captures the quality and unique local perspective of our food bloggers and shared it with the world,” said Ryan Stern, Director of the Foodbuzz Publisher Community. “It illustrates exactly what the future of food publishing is all about – real food, experienced by real people, shared real-time.”

About Foodbuzz, Inc.

Based in San Francisco, Foodbuzz, Inc., launched its beta Web site, foodbuzz.com, in 2007. In less than a year, Fooduzz.com and its community of over 1,000 exclusive partner food blogs have grown into an extended online property that reaches more than three million users.

Junglefrog Cooking » blogging

The 7 links project – Looking back at history

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Metaphors, similes and what it’s all about…

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My one year anniversary!!

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More catering plus…. new site!

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