skinny girls & mayonnaise

I vaguely remember the American Bicentennial. I was a young kid, there were lots of patriotic advertisements on TV and specially minted quarters with a drummer on the back.

I’m pleased to have you here, celebrating the Skinny Girls Bicentennial — our 200th post! (Probably not exactly the right term for a 200th post, but what the heck.) When I first launched Skinny Girls & Mayonnaise a year and a half ago, I got 30 or 40 visitors on a good day, and 8 on a bad day. Now I get 50 on my worst days, and 250 on a good day. I guess that’s growth.

Has it become more challenging to come up with topics? people will sometimes ask me. Interestingly enough, it is exactly the same as it was in the beginning. Some days I have five ideas for post topics, and other days I have zero. I guess it’s always the same creative process, and there’s a lot to write about in the world of food and eating. Sometimes I’ll get an idea and can’t believe I haven’t written about it already. Other times I’ll be writing about something, get a weird sense of deja vu, do a search of my own blog, and find out I already wrote that exact thing. (Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before…)

Some topics I write about are only peripherally related to food: baseball, nannies, health inspectors, lost items, the psychology of pigs. But there’s always an in.

A lot of my visitors come from web searches. For some reason, “tongs” is a search engine term that ranks highly every day — today I had nine visitors arriving by a “tongs” search, yesterday 22. When I enter “tongs” on Google, I can scroll through 100 pages and not find a single link to Skinny Girls & Mayonnaise. Most of the few scattered mentions of tongs on my blog have been melancholy — a lamenting of tongs I’ve lost at one place and time or another. I wonder if there are others like me out there, perhaps an army of us: sad cooks wondering what happened to our favorite tongs, finding comfort in community.

I often see people coming to the site through the search term, “skinny girls ribs”, and I can never be sure whether it was someone familiar with the blog looking for one of my rib recipes, or simply a pervert with a unique fetish. Same with a search term I noticed today, “women eat octopus.”

Mostly I look at the log of daily search terms because it is endlessly entertaining to me. Among the strange or humorous search terms that brought people to my site recently:

“chicken in love with you”
“best comment for skinny people”
“man 1950”
“how to get unwelcome guest out of your house”
“unlucky baby duck”
“oreo earth”
“japanese daikon radishes are always good for a laugh” (my personal favorite)

Or how about this one: “диспенсер для сливок iso”
(I’m pretty sure I’ve never written that before!)

The mother of one of my kids’s friends at school — and a woman I’ve known for several years now — approached me the other day and said, “Skinny Girls and Mayonnaise!??”

“Are you just now finding out about this??” I asked.

“I had no idea,” she said. “Everybody’s talking about it.”

Finally…