Who, Me?

A weird thing happened the other day: I got nominated for a Food Stories Award! To be honest, I thought it was spam at first. Don’t lie, I’m sure you’re looking at each other and thinking it still is, but I swear I checked it out and made sure my computer remained uninfected – it’s legit! So I hopped on board the nomination train. Thanks so much Food Stories, I really appreciate the tip’o the cap (unless of course you’re super-sneaky spammers using my blog to send secretly codes messages or something, in which case, well, you’re creative, I’ll give you that). Now that I’ve likely dashed my chances of winning by admitting that I thought my nominators were high-tech spammers, I’ll get to the nitty-gritty. The deal is as follows: I have to tell y’all about five of my favourite sites. Again, I’ll be honest… though I write a food blog, I don’t actually read very many. The reason is simple – I’ve always been afraid that if I started reading or following blogs, that all I would do is sit and read blog entries. I mean really – there are millions of us! How could I possibly choose?

But choose I must… Here are the bloggers who make me smile, inspire me to try new recipes and genuinely seem to be nice folks:

Would Rather Gather: a vegetarian blog with wonderfully thought out recipes and a straight-forward, engaging tone. A fellow Ottawan, I’m going to be a total nerd and admit that I totally wanted to be her friend after reading her About Me and the first few recipes posted on her home page. Now that’s what I call a well-written blog!

The Vegan Stoner: true, they don’t really tell the traditional type of story with words and sentences and stuff, but they offer up amazing, original, tantalizing vegan food in cartoon form. I have a book of stories written in 50 words and those were considered stories, so I would argue that these recipes constitute a type of story as well. A tasty story…

Chocolate Covered Katie: a vegan dessert blog written by a what seems to be a supremely adorable woman who has an amazing metabolism. I’m not going to lie, the multiple almost-identical images in each post kinda drive me crazy, but I’ve tried a number of her recipes and they’re always delicious and stand up well to my inevitable tweaks. I heartily recommended this site to vegans and non-vegans alike, because you won’t care if there’s no milk or eggs – the desserts are that scrumptious.

Frugal Feeding: a charming blog filled with wallet-conscious recipes, beautiful pictures and personal riffs on traditional recipes. True, a lot of the recipes aren’t vegan, but that’s where the fun lies for me. I love trying to figure out how I could possibly veganize it without compromising the original intent.

Emmy Cooks: another charming non-vegan blogger who writes in such a way that I can hear her speaking, reading out her post to me as I read it  (of course I realize that she probably doesn’t sound like Morgan Freeman, but hey, I can’t help who my imagination seizes upon). In addition, her recipes are inventive and versatile. What more could you ask for?

If this post could include non-foodie references, I would include my friends’ site (The Marvelous in Nature), because it’s a super awesome blog written by a really talented writer, but she deals with nature, not food… But… well maybe you’ll click over anyway  🙂

I hope you visit these sites and enjoy all they have to offer. I know I do! Ok, now back to the kitchen to make me some black-bean brownies under Gus’ watchful eye…

I love napping.