smitten kitchen

• 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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Menu for Hope is an annual fundraiser put together by food bloggers around the globe to raise money for a world cause–this year, the U.N. World Food Programme, and will run from December 10 through the 24th. Food bloggers entice you to give through–what else?–food-related gifts. For each $10 you donate, you may choose to enter your name into a raffle for a specific prize. The full list of donated raffle prizes is here.

But really, all you want to know is: What is the Smitten Kitchen donating? And that would be two Cookie Care Packages.

Alex and I want to reward two donators with a box of homemade cookies from a recipe previously featured on smittenkitchen.com, shipped to your doorstep.

Options include Big Fat Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies, Molasses Spice Cookies, Homemade Oreos, Russian Tea Cakes, Poilâne Bakery in Paris’s Punition/Sable Cookies, the world-famous World Peace Cookies or Rugelach Pinwheels, just to get your appetite whetted. Should these not be your speed, additional cookie recipes will be coming in next week, so keep your eyes peeled for more buttery-sugary decadence.

The only caveat is that we can only ship these within the U.S. Cookies will not make it internationally without getting stale or broken, and would cost a prohibitive fortune. However, there are a fantastic number of prizes from the EU, all detailed on Foodbeam.

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I know what you’ve been thinking: this site’s great and all, but man, could it use some work. Why can I preview a comment before I post it? Why can’t I print this recipe? Why can’t I email this to my Aunt in Cincinnati who’s all “blob? What’s a blob?”

No, you weren’t thinking that? Well, I did, every day. But due to a combination of my FOP (Fear of Plugins) and my choice of WordPress as a platform, I had significant limitations. By the way, my FOP was very rightly founded, I’ll have you know. Friday night, when I was all, “Alex, you’re smart and techy. I’m, well, occasionally smart and fairly techy. Why can’t we just figure this damned thing out?” Even now, I want to go back in time and stop this conversation right there because five minutes later, I was hugging a pillow, rocking inconsolably in the corner, while Alex was sheet-white and sweating because we had somehow, with our combined embarrassingly vast knowledge of technology, managed to delete my entire goddamned site. Poof! What, you were looking for a recipe? Why not check out this “Index of/” instead?

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