Happy Halloween and Blogher Month in Review

Halloween Photo from Joomlablog.

It's Halloween, the day that kids love and elementary school teachers dread. My school has a Halloween parade in the morning right when the kids come to school, so it's relatively painless. Still, it's safe to say that Halloween isn't my favorite holiday. I'm not a total Halloween scrooge though. Here's a link to something fun for Halloween, sent to me by my young-at-heart friend Alanna.

Recipe for Grilled Spicy Tuna

I still had a few recipes hanging around in my recipe archives that didn't have a photo, from the days before I entered the digital camera age. Now that I have my new camera there's an entire new set of photos from the time before I entered the improved-photos-SLR-Digital-Camera age, but I guess those will have to wait until I get all the photo-less recipes taken care of!

Friday Food Porn: Dinner at Market Street Oyster Bar and Another Guest Photographer!

Friday nights I like to tease all my blog readers with photos of yummy looking, (often not South Beach Diet approved) food that I "may or may not have eaten." These photos are from last Friday, when I had dinner at The Market Street Oyster Bar in Salt Lake City, with friends Mary, Ken, and Diane, graciously hosted by Mary's father, Nick.

I've written about Nick before, since he was one of the first readers to send me a recipe for the blog, and Nick's Chipotle Grilled Shrimp with Black Bean Salsa was one of the first recipes where I took photos. If you click on that recipe, you see I've learned a bit about photographing food since then, but it's definitely a great recipe, one you should try if you have a grill.

Thai Chicken Soup Recipe

First, my appreciation to all the cilantro-hating readers who have allowed me to indulge myself for an entire month of cilantro worship and have kept reading my blog and barely complained about all the cilantro! I'm ending my month with this recipe for Thai Chicken Soup, similar to a soup that might be called Tom Ka Gai or Dom Yam Gai at your favorite Thai restaurant. (And if anyone like Ed or Pim knows the difference between those two types of soups, I'd love to know.)

South Beach Recipes of the Week #15: Beef

Hooray, it's Sunday, and on Sundays I like to spotlight low glycemic index recipes I find on other food blogs. If you don't know what I mean by the glycemic index, it's what the South Beach Diet is based on. This week I'm going to share some great recipes for beef.

The Best Recipes from Kalyn's Kitchen: What I'd Cook If My Favorite Food Bloggers Came For Dinner

One thing I really love to do is to invite people to my house for dinner. Sadly, now that I'm teaching school full-time, writing a blog, and also writing a few posts a week for Blogher, it's something I don't have time to do as often as I'd like. However, I'd love to think that people all over the world are having dinner with me virtually as they read the blog and see what I'm cooking. I've been lucky enough to have two experiences of meeting a few food bloggers in person, and I've met many more online. If any of these friends ever came to Salt Lake, you can be sure I'd love to cook a wonderful dinner for them.

Friday Food Porn: Hell's Backbone Grill and a Guest Photographer

Who would have imagined that squeaky-clean Utah would be home to a restaurant called Hell's Backbone Grill? Located in the southern Utah town of Boulder - think red rock beautiful - this local eatery is garnishing quite a reputation. Utah food blogger Vanessa of She Craves recently wrote about a day she escaped from Salt Lake and visited Hell's Backbone and Vanessa raved about the food as well as the natural beauty of the setting.

Recipe for Grilled Halibut with Garlic Cilantro Sauce

For all you cilantro-haters out there, please allow me to indulge myself for just a few more recipes, and then I'll get off this cilantro kick and actually use some basil, rosemary, or parsley, some of my other favorite herbs. But since cilantro was officially crowned the favorite herb for the one year anniversary of Weekend Herb Blogging, I vowed I'd use it for all my WHB recipes for a month, and I'm a woman who keeps her promises.

Choosing the Right Bread for The South Beach Diet: World Bread Day

Today is World Bread Day, and I did bake the bread you see in the picture above. I confess I made it in my favorite Oster Bread Machine, using a mix, but I'm guessing some of you are surprised that I make bread at all. After all, you can't eat bread on the South Beach Diet can you?

Well, actually you can. But you have to learn to choose the right kind of bread, taking into consideration the ingredients, of course.

South Beach Recipes of the Week #14: Soup

On Sundays I like to spotlight low glycemic index recipes I find on other food blogs. If you don't know about the glycemic index, it's what the South Beach Diet is based on. Soup can be a great option for most diets, with so many varieties to choose from. Lots of these soups have beans, and many people don't realize that beans are considered a *good carb* on South Beach, even allowed for phase one.

Friday Food Porn: KitchenK in St. Louis

On Fridays I like to post food shots I've taken of things that I *may or may not* have eaten. These are often things that aren't necessarily South Beach Diet food, so if you're a South Beach fan, beware. Remember, I was on vacation when I ate one of these meals!

Tomato and Cilantro Soup Recipe

In case anyone missed it, cilantro was officially crowned the *favorite herb* for the one year anniversary of Weekend Herb Blogging a few weeks back. That meant there were a lot of good cilantro recipes when we posted a list of favorite herb recipes from around the world. Of course, I also picked it as my own favorite herb, and posted a lot of my best cilantro recipes. Never satisfied, I vowed to use cilantro for Weekend Herb Blogging every week this month, which is a long way of explaining how I came to be making this soup last night.

Recipe for Roasted Salmon with Balsamic Sauce

Here's another easy, easy dish that's South Beach Diet friendly and only uses a few ingredients. The salmon in this healthy dinner combination was inspired by Blue Hake with Balsamic Syrup posted by Glenna from A Fridge Full of Food. I consulted Beyond Salmon to get an idea of how long I should roast the salmon if it was being cooked with squash roasted at 450 F. I wasn't sure how salmon would taste with the Balsamic sauce, but everything about this experimental dinner turned out to be a success.

I Met Them in St. Louis: A Food Bloggers' Weekend

I'm starting out this post with the ode to veggies which appears above the stove of Alanna, one of my favorite food blog friends, who I'd never met in person when she invited me to stay at her house last weekend and join the the St. Louis food bloggers for a workshop. Alanna started her blog, A Veggie Venture, to document her year of trying a new way to cook vegetables every day which she completed on April 1, 2006. Through Veggie Venture Alanna and I became online friends, cemented when we both became writers for Blogher, and we probably haven't gone more than a few days since without chatting by e-mail. When she decided to organize a workshop in food photography for a group of St. Louis food bloggers, it seemed like the perfect time to meet in person.

Chicken Lettuce Wraps served with a side of "Can we eat yet, I'm starving?"

It's entirely possible that the most common phrase a food blogger will ever hear is: "Can we eat yet?" And if there are children in the household you add two additional words onto that sentence: "I'm staaaaarving." (NOTE: The longer you take garnishing and photographing your culinary creations the more a's you'll need to add to the word starving.) If I had one of those little silver click counters in my hand and clicked it every time Hannah (eleven), or Gunther (eight) or my partner Bradley (old enough to know better) said those words last night, I'd have a serious case of carpel tunnel right now, and my guest food blogging days would be over.

South Beach Recipes of the Week #13: Appetizers and Party Food

On Sundays I like to spotlight low glycemic index recipes I find on other food blogs. If you don't know about the glycemic index, it's what the South Beach Diet is based on. I know I've missed two weeks, getting seriously distracted by posting about my favorite cilantro recipes and collecting all the Favorite Herb Recipes from Great Cooks Around the World. So even though I'm away this weekend, I wrote this post early so you wouldn't miss another week.

Friday Food Porn: Food Memories and Making More Food Memories

It's time for Friday Food Porn, where I entice you with food that I may or may not have eaten, and this week I'm focusing on Food Memories. These are all food photos I've taken that have some kind of recent memory associated with them.

Easy South Beach Recipes: Roasted Squash with Garlic

A few months ago I succumbed to pressure from friends and started posting easy recipes once a week or so. These were dishes with a limited number of ingredients, and preparation methods that weren't challenging. Two things have been surprising. First, I'm amazed at how many of the things I love to cook actually fit into this category. Second, the popularity of Easy South Beach Recipes in my recipe archives has been remarkable. It's consistently the most visited part of the recipe archives.

Recipe for Thai Barbecue Chicken with Cilantro

I'm experimenting with an idea that I may abandon later; I can be fickle that way. But right now I'm thinking it might be fun to use the same herb for an entire month for Weekend Herb Blogging, so October is the month of cilantro. Obviously this choice was inspired by the fact that cilantro was selected as *most preferred herb* when we celebrated the one year anniversary of Weekend Herb Blogging last weekend. I don't mean to rub it in to all you lovers-of-other-herbs, but I just haven't had my fill of cilantro yet, despite my post featuring a collection of some of my favorite cilantro recipes.

Recipe for Baked Penne with Sausage Recipe

Last night I posted the collection of favorite herb recipes from around the world - the finale for the one year anniversary of Weekend Herb Blogging, and it was a fun conclusion to a week of talking about herbs. Time for a regular old recipe! This is something I made a few weeks ago, and it's now waiting in the freezer to become tasty lunches. If you used sauce from a jar, this would be a super easy recipe. I make it with my own Sausage and Basil Marinara Sauce, but even with sauce from a jar this would still taste pretty great.

Favorite Herb Recipes from Great Cooks Around the World

The Favorite Herb Recipes
All this week we asked food bloggers to post recipes featuring their favorite herbs to commemorate the one year anniversary of Weekend Herb Blogging. If you've been tracking the herb tallies, you realize that there are a lot of different favorite herbs out there in food blog land, a fact that surprised me as much as it did everyone else.