smitten kitchen

Friends, we have so much catching up to do. I promised before I went to the Bahamas that when I got back, I’d have some cool stuff to share, but somehow it is over four weeks later and we are really overdue for a pow-wow. Plus, it’s Tax Day and I’ve been moping around all week with my pockets inside out since I was presented with a bill with an impossible number of zeros after it, and hey, wouldn’t we all rather focus on the cheerful stuff? Of course. So without further ado:

The Smitten Kitchen is moving: Well, not urls, thank god (though in a fit of obsessiveness last week, I decided at once to go on a domain shopping spree and you can now get here via smittenkitchen.org, smittenkitchen.info or smittenkitchen.net. Wish I could go on normal people shopping sprees, like for shoes.). But as I have alluded to — namely through griping about the packing and the sorting and the boxes, and lord, the boxes — we’ve found a new apartment and we’re moving this weekend. And we can’t wait. I lived in the East Village when I first moved to NYC in 2000, and am thrilled to have found an excuse to move back. Perhaps I’ll even check out this “Trader Joes” you kids are always going on about!

But who cares about the neighborhood? Let’s get down to the brass tacks. That sound you hear? It’s the sky opening up and the angels singing in the new smitten kitchen, as there is a large white machine whose sole purpose is to wash dishes for us. I can barely handle all of this excitement at once. Alex, who we all know deals with the brunt of the dishes here, is already wondering whether we can just pack up this week’s dirty dishes and just wash ‘em when we arrive this weekend. The jury is still out on that one.

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The last time I gave away sets of my favorite reusable grocery bags, you — and your two thousand, five hundred and thirty-six comments — broke my server. Once my hosting company fixed the server, they evicted me and insisted that I move to a shinier, better server and began charging me eight times as much. Not that I am bitter or complaining or anything! You are worth every penny.

But, I decided that if I ever did a giveaway again, it would have to be for a very good cause, and that, my friends, brings us up to today.

The Menu for Hope campaign is organized annually by food bloggers all over the world who donate raffle prizes that contributors are eligible to enter for with each $10 donation. Last year — a year I gave out cookie care packages, which are great and all but certainly not nearly as cool as earth-saving, plastic-bag-banishing reusable bags — we raised $92,000 for the UN World Food Program, enabling the program to reach out to 86.1 million people in 80 countries in 2007 to fight hunger. This year, I’ve teamed up with Delight.com to offer two sets of RuMe reusable bags. Each set contains three full-size bags and the winners of these two prizes can choose the color and/or pattern set they like best.

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• It only took us four months, but we have finally set up a store where those of you who are interested can buy prints of our photos. We ordered a couple of prints a few weeks ago to verify that the quality was what we had hoped, and were pleased with the results. We hope that you will be too. We’ve uploaded some of our favorite photos, but if there are any photos from our Flickr page or from this site’s archives that you’d like to purchase, just let us know and we’ll add it to the store. Unfortunately, you will find that many of our older pictures are not big enough to yield more than a small print–believe me, we’re kicking ourselves too! [The Smitten Kitchen Photo Store]

• If you’ve made a recipe from this site and left a note about it in the comments, created a link to it from your blog, or tagged it with “smittenkitchen” on Flickr, I have probably checked it out because I simply love to see how these things work out for you, and what you may have done to adapt it. However, this is not the most efficient system, so when a brilliant commenter suggested yesterday that we create a smitten kitchen Flickr photo pool, I jumped right on it. This group is open to anyone who posts pictures on Flickr, and I can’t wait to see what you add to it. And yes, bonus points will be awarded for pictures of said baked goods accompanied by puppies or babies. [Smitten Kitchen Recipes Photo Pool]
• Dedicated food bloggers Elise, Kalyn and Alanna teamed up to create something I think the Web has been missing for some time: a custom food blog search engine. Powered by only the best–Google Search–it includes results from over one thousand food blogs. Nowhere but food blogs will you see recipes tested and reviewed with such enthusiasm and imagery. I use this resource so often, I put a widget for it in the sidebar, as well, but you can just bookmark the foodblogsearch.com. The darling imagery was created by Loberstersquad’s Ximena. [FoodBlogSearch.com, a custom search engine]

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My first day back to work after New Years started with my laptop flat lining, having to clean the office pantry microwave after my oatmeal blew up in it, finding myself completely and frantically over my head in a new bit of work I personally requested the week before and a wind-tunneled trip to the new Apple store to gaze at the shiny brightness. In short, I had hoped to be gently eased into 2008, but since that wasn’t in the cards for me, I ended it with a dinner of French Toast. What? Tell me that you’re not jealous.

But you know what else I did, you know, in my maple syrup haze? I completed one half of one of my smittenkitchen new years resolutions! See that over there in the sidebar? Yup, that would be a cooking or kitchen Tip of the Day from little old me. (Hat tip to problogdesign.com for spelling this method out so clearly!) I’ve got a few kinks to work out–like an RSS feed for that category, as I’ve realized these aren’t working–but as I populate the archives, you should start seeing bits of information I’ve picked up over the years spit out to you in bytes. Comments are open, so if you find my Buttermilk Recipe, for example, to be totally off its rocker, feel free to tell me so. It wouldn’t be the first time.

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