skinny girls & mayonnaise

“How’s the blog going?” a friend asked somewhere around post #170 or so.

Great, I replied. My audience is growing. People seem to really like the blog.

“What’s your end game?” the friend asked.

‘End game’? I said. Well, I guess one day I die and that’s the end of the game.

“No, I mean are you planning on monetizing it at some point?”

‘Monetizing’ it? Like it’s a new kind of hair dryer or vacuum cleaner I’m trying to come to market with? No, said I, it’s just a fun creative writing outlet that provides me and my audience some enjoyment. I have no particular grander plans. Although…

(There’s always an although…)

The blog did represent a toe-dip back into the more public world of food, a world I ran screaming from some 20-odd years before when I gave up my last restaurant job and the promise of a grueling future running my own kitchen to finish my education and get on with a normal life. Where that toe-dip might lead was anyone’s guess.

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I’m neurotically consistent about my posts. I launch one every Monday and Thursday afternoon. When I forget, I’m crestfallen.

“Do you think I blog too often?” I asked my steady blogging influence, Rachel. “Should I go to once a week instead of twice? Am I giving my audience blog fatigue?”

No, Rachel assured me, my regularity was just fine. In fact, WordPress — which hosts my blog — in their “Expanding Your Audience” advice suggest as tip #1 that you post consistently.

Speaking of Rachel, one of the most surprising side benefits of my blog is all my favorite-people-I’ve-never-met who comment on my blog and I on theirs. I never knew before launching my blog that there is a whole blogosphere community out there.

Now helping run a business, working, caring for three children, and trying to save a little time to write, paint, garden, cook and compose a song here or there, I don’t have much time left for virtual communities. Heck, I hardly have time for my real community.

But I do enjoy connecting with Michelle and Steve of Gourmandistan in Louisville, KY; with the aforementioned Rachel of Rachel’s Table in Delaware; with Big Ben in Chicago and the Kat and her falling leaves in Toronto. I like to read about my friends-I’ve-never-met who have a historic plantation inn in Virginia, and Conor the foodie and Irish marketing guy in Dublin. I like the pure food porn of Jessamine in Portland — you rock, luv. And miscellaneous others too numerous to mention. I wouldn’t know any of them if I passed them on the street, but at least I know I’ve always got a couch to sleep on in each of these far-flung locales if I need one… right? …  friends??

I also hear from random people like the woman who grew up on the Caspian Sea and responded to the caviar mentioned in my New Year’s Eve post, the guy from Tokyo who responded that he’d never seen any evidence of the samurai-like attention to beauty in knives and sashimi I’d waxed romantic about in my hara hache bunme post, or the guy who was a North Korean expert who loved my photos of the Dear Leader inspecting beef in my Korean short ribs post.

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I wondered early on if I might run out of things to write about — mostly because a friend said, “Don’t you worry you might run out of things to write about?”

300 posts and still going strong, and the well hasn’t yet run dry. Just yesterday, returning from an eventful day running about town with my wife and kids, I hopped on the computer and jotted down thoughts for posts about the world’s best strawberries and lunching in Little Tokyo. The day before I’d sketched out the beginnings of posts on kitchen short cuts and eating at an old school steak & chop place. The biggest problem is not ideas — it’s time. (See above point about running a business, working, caring for three children, and trying to save a little time to write, paint, garden, cook and compose a song here or there.)

I guess in theory I would one day run out of things to write about, simply because I’d written about everything there was to write about. But I figure I’ve got about 12,000 years before that would happen.

Hope to see you all at 400.