Dining and Opining

Ok. After celebrating Dining and Opining's One-Year Anniversary and then taking a few days off to regroup, I had high hopes for my return to this blogging space. I hoped to come up with some clear, clever structure that would allow me to post less frequently, but more thoughtfully and usefully. One day on "dining" (with photos/recaps of actual food/cooking experiences) and one day "opining" (with more discursive essays on food culture, politics, or history)? Or one recipe and one article analysis a week? Or maybe some riff off those photo-a-day projects, where I tried to post one photo each day that chronicled my experience with food during that day, along with some creative nonfiction that put the photo in context? Or a focus on food memoir, to go along with the course I'm teaching this semester, where I shared stories from my food-filled past? All these ideas whirling around, but as is often the case with good ideas--they all started raising my expectat...

Today marks one full year since I began this little blog. One year since I first made an entrance . One year of writing posts every single weekday, rain or shine, happy or sad. A year of recipes and reading links , of photographs and holidays celebrated together. I have a lot of thoughts about how this year has gone, and how the experience of producing this blog has shaped me and my reflections on food.  I hope to devote my next few blog posts to sharing some of those thoughts, as I consider what comes next for Dining and Opining. (And, as always, I wholeheartedly welcome your input). What will almost certainly come next is a bit of a pause, and a bit of a re-structuring. I likely won't be posting every day this week, and may not establish a regular rhythm right away. Whichever way it goes, I'll keep posted. But, for now, I want to THANK YOU for being along for the ride, for reading and thinking with me, for commenting (either on the blog or in person) and lett...

Happy 2012! I've been writing on this here blog for a full eleven months now, with my first post on January 28, 2011. I have posted every single weekday between now and then, come rain or shine, hell or high water, delicious meals or brain tumors. When I first began this project, I intended for it to be something I'd do regularly for one full year, to test myself, my writing abilities, my stick-to-it-iveness. And since then, Dining and Opining has felt like a really central part of my life, something I look forward to as a way of cataloging my days and my thoughts on food. It has been a way of connecting with all of you readers (those who are my dear friends and those who've stumbled across this little project from elsewhere). It has been a way of putting my thoughts down, collecting my reflections in one place, recording all those little scraps of ideas and photos and foods.  And as the one year of this project comes to an end, I'm thinking a lot about what comes...

So, I know that one of the failings of the modern shiny-photo-filled blog era is that it can seem like bloggers never make mistakes, and always have perfect results from their perfect kitchens. That's only because the mistakes don't get posted! So, in honor of transparency, I'll now share the flipside of that rosy braided challah you all saw yesterday . Are you ready? Yep. Pretty gnarly, eh? And after lots of scraping and slicing with various tools, my cutting board looked like this: But the bread somehow pulled through, and the top 80% has offered us delicious slices of toast. I'll blame our old and drafty oven for this one (and for all the burning of baked goods I do), but at least the rolls (which were on the top rack) came out without a touch of black-ness, only the rosy glow of bread baked just right.

We recently did a bit of rearranging in our bedroom, which opened up some wall space.  In thinking about what to hang there to add some color to our room, I was inspired by my Mom's recent redecorating. She, being a devoted Dining and Opining fan, found a few images from the blog that she loved, had them blown up and printed, and then framed them for some walls in my parents' house. I went a cheaper route, printing regular 4"x6" food photos from the blog to create a sort of matrix collage that adds up to one larger wall hanging. I just used little pieces of blue painter's tape, rolled up to function as double-sided tape, on each of the four corners of each photo.  I arranged the photos in roughly rainbow color order (from red in the top left to green-ish in the bottom right) beforehand, and then hung them up, using the bottom middle photo (the open-faced sandwiches) to frame the remaining photos around. I used a yard stick to make the even space between each row...

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Check out my guest post "Catering as a Wedding Gift" at 2000 Dollar Wedding ! And leave a comment there, too, if you'd like!

In my continuing effort to make this blog more usable, I've just added a new How-To page , at the top of the blog, along with the About Me , About this Blog , and Recipes . "Ongoing Projects" still to come! I don't quite know which direction this How-To page will go, but I've just begun by adding a few links to posts that describe certain methods that might be nice to have bookmarked and highlighted in a special way.  Please let me know if there are other posts that you think would fit in well! And again, if you have any suggestions about the blog more broadly--types of posts you like best, recipes you'd like to see, questions you have, food topics you want to know more about--please do let me know!

 In the interest of keeping all my catering posts organized before I move on to other topics, here's an index of sorts: Catering for Eighty in which I lay out the ideas * No Woman is an Island in which I share some of my inspiration and other resources around the 'net * Catering Menu Ideas and Recipes in which I brainstorm and share a range of possible dishes * Wedding Menu Revealed! in which our final menu is shared * Self-Catering Supplies in which I ponder a range of possibilities for supplying the event * Full Bellies and Hearts  in which I offer my first post-event thoughts (and some beautiful photos) * Buying Food and Supplies in which I share stories about purchasing the necessary goods * Organizing the Beast  in which I reveal tips on how to keep a big cooking project organized * The Joys of Communal Cooking in which I love on my friends and sous chefs * Eating and Celebrating in which I describe the actual wedding, and bring this story to a close

In an effort to make this blog more usable, I'm planning on making a series of stand-alone pages in addition to " About Me " and " About this Blog " that I'll try to update regularly to provide quick links to some overview sections like Recipes , How-To Guides, and Ongoing Projects. I've just begun by building the Recipes page , where you can find a collection of links to all the recipes I've posted on the blog so far. Please let me know if any are missing or if any of the links don't work! And if you have any suggestions about the blog more broadly--types of posts you like best, recipes you'd like to see, questions you have, food topics you want to know more about--please do let me know!