What’s For Dinner?

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Atlantans get blogging about food

Writers discuss everything from restaurant reviews to recipes

By JOHN KESSLER

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Thursday, February 05, 2009

The fans of Tami Hardeman’s food blog, Running With Tweezers, know what to expect with each new post: a colorful and appetizing photograph, an original recipe that usually falls somewhere on the healthy/vegetarian spectrum and a descriptive essay rich with writerly nuance that puts the recipe in emotional context.

“Food happens for a reason,” says the 32-year-old Decaturite, who can count on upward of 15,000 hits monthly. “Your body craves or your mind craves things that are going to make them feel good.”

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HYOSUB SHIN/hshin@ajc.com

Betty Joan Thurber (from left), Christina Arpante and Tami Hardeman have blogs about food. Thurber is a grant administrator; Arpante, a middle school assistant principal; and Hardeman, a professional food stylist.

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Tami Hardeman

Hazelnut Mousse by Christina Arpante of the blog Mele Cotte is adapted from a Dorie Greenspan cookbook. It’s made with Nutella and is safe for all ages because it doesn’t contain raw egg.

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LOUIE FAVORITE/lfavorite@ajc.com

Grandma Thurber’s Long Island Clam Chowder is time-consuming but worth it, blogger Betty Joan Thurber says.

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LOUIE FAVORITE/lfavorite@ajc.com

Tami Hardeman’s Brussels Sprouts With Walnuts and Currants.

BLOGGERS' RECIPES:
• Brussels Sprouts With Walnuts and Currants
• Grandma Thurber’s Long Island Clam Chowder
• Hazelnut Mousse
• Jennifer Zyman’s Mole Chilaquiles

CHECK OUT KESSLER'S NEW BLOG
Longtime Atlanta Journal-Constitution food writer John Kessler has added his voice to the chorus of Atlanta food bloggers. Kessler — a former Food & Drink columnist and, before that, restaurant reviewer — offers a full plate of subjects in his blog, Food and More. Expect to find home-cooking tips, food shopping around the city, late-breaking dining news and more than a few offbeat asides.
• Look for his blog at blogs.ajc.com/food-and-more.

By this measure, Hardeman didn’t shy from parsing her feelings about food as she tended to her cancer-stricken father in the hospital, and then in hospice. Only then did she understand the worldwide reach of her blog.

“People e-mailed me from Australia and New Zealand,” Hardeman marvels. “It was like, wow.”

Min Kye started her blog, Beef and Chocolate, mainly as a means to communicate with her sister in Singapore. The 36-year-old Doraville resident likes to try recipes from other blogs and periodicals, and then post pictures of her attempts with brief, bitingly funny commentary. She also shares stories about feeding her proto-foodie toddler, Ava, and her unadventurous husband, whom she calls “Yohboh.”

The blog serves its purpose — attracting about 30 hits a day, mostly from friends and family.

These two blogs, among the scores of independent Atlanta-area online food journals, have different ambitions. Yet both are part of a vast discourse that is remaking the way home cooks search out, vet, modify and contribute to the annals of cookery.

There is no accurate measure of the number of food blogs, but plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests they are multiplying faster than Nigerian millionaires. The Food Blog Blog (a meta-blog, if you will) lists 2,000, but that number doesn’t count the (presumably) thousands of small efforts, like Beef and Chocolate. A Technorati search pulls up about 15,000.

This has all happened quickly.

Hardeman, a professional food stylist who makes dishes from Olive Garden and Hooters look appetizing in print, announced to colleagues at a photo shoot three years ago that she was planning to start a food blog. No one knew what she was talking about.

But as a fan of pioneering food blogs, such as Orangette, she saw the potential for personal and professional benefit.

“I didn’t take it that seriously at first,” she recalls, and yet through near-daily posts began to develop her distinctive voice. Soon, clients found her through her blog, and she landed a gig writing for the local publication Atlanta Cuisine. She joined challenges and virtual cook-offs staged with food bloggers throughout the country, and so found her posts prominently threaded through the emerging national quilt.

Christina Arpante, 36, an assistant principal in a Cobb County middle school, has also found the community of food bloggers an empowering and welcoming group. An aspiring pastry chef, Arpante started her blog, Mele Cotte (“baked apples” in Italian), as a journal of her progress.

“I’d make something and then forget how I did it,” says Arpante of her pre-blogging life. “Plus, I was trying to expand my palate; I wasn’t experienced with that many different foods.”

So Arpante joined the group Daring Bakers, an online collective of more than 1,000 cooks that engages in virtual bake-offs. A recipe is issued, and then everyone makes it, putting his or her own spin on it. When the challenge was issued to make a chocolate-nut torte, Arpante eschewed the actual cake, reworked the frosting, and responded with her now-signature Hazelnut Mousse.

This constant tweaking of recipes is a cornerstone of the new library that today’s food bloggers are building. Recipes move from blog to blog to blog, and everyone has an adjustment.

“There are very few recipes I don’t give a tweak to,” says Betty Joan Thurber, a 28-year-old grant administrator who lives in Poncey Highland and details her cooking projects at Trouble With Toast (the name comes from a Julia Child quote).

Thurber prints off recipes she sees on other blogs and sticks them in a pile with others torn from magazines, and then lets her fiancé decide what he wants for dinner.

Thurber began blogging about four years ago when she moved to Washington. “I didn’t know a soul,” she recalls, “but soon I found a really strong blogging community.” Not only did she find a virtual connection to like-minded cooks, but also a group of friends with whom to hold dinner parties.

As with nearly all the bloggers interviewed for this story, Thurber did not set out to become a food blogger.

“My first blog was filled with random musings,” she says, pausing over the memory. “But, really, nobody read it but me and my mom.” Now she pulls in about 150 hits a day.

Such was the experience of Gene Lee, 35, who first attempted a more general, personal blog. Yet the posts that excited him, and the ones he really worked at, all had to do with food. Now he counts other local food bloggers as his friends and dining companions, and his Eat Drink Man … A Food Journal is one of the better-read local takes on cooking and dining in Atlanta.

The cooking-vs.-dining issue looms large in the food blog world. Some are strictly one or the other but many, increasingly, are a hybrid. Thurber, for instance, likes to cook simple and straightforward American food, but also checks out buzzy new restaurants, such as Craft and Flip. (She doesn’t mince words when the restaurant comes up short.)

Generally speaking, the more a blog concerns cooking, the more it is likely to find an audience outside its geographic area; the more it focuses on restaurants, the more it figures in a pointed back-and-forth local discourse that plays out in the blog’s comments section and on bulletin boards.

The best-known independent Atlanta restaurant blogger is Jennifer Zyman, whose Blissful Glutton site has become the go-to for ethnic restaurant finds and early looks at important new restaurants. (It clocks more than 18,000 hits a month.)

Zyman, 32, who is a writer and photographer, has parlayed her online food musings into a career as a food writer and is a regular contributor to Creative Loafing and Atlanta magazine.

That creates an unusual dilemma. The more she dines in service to weekly print stories, the more she documents shopping and cooking on the blog. Her regular Food Finds features gourmet items — handmade mole at the Peachtree Road Farmers Market, crisps for cheese at Whole Foods — that she uses at home.

“My blog is about exploring everything in Atlanta about food, but it’s not about me,” Zyman says. “It’s about finding great restaurants and great ingredients.”

For Kye, blogging on Beef and Chocolate is simply something she does after she puts her daughter to bed. She knows that one day she’ll be able to show it to her.

Hardeman, thinking over the past three years of compiling Running With Tweezers, says, “I didn’t realize how influential it would be in all parts of my life.”

That’s true for readers, as well. More and more, people turn to food blogs for recipes and encouragement, they join the conversation and, together, they ponder the daily question: What’s for dinner?

ON THE ATLANTA MENU

Here are 15 Atlanta-area gastronomic blogs worth checking out:

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