To keep blogging I have to cook, but the blog can’t eat the food, so I need to make dishes the people I cook for will actually eat. Here’s a recent exchange I had with Zoe:
Lulu: Hey, Zoe, give me some ideas for recipes I can make and post this week. Something you’d like to eat.
Zoe: How about sausages?
Lulu: But that’s not nistisima! I’m blogging nistisima!
Zoe: Ante pali me ta nistisma!
I don’t know how other food bloggers manage to publish new recipes two or three times a week, or even more often. Today, by popular demand, I made Kalamarakia Krasata. Do other bloggers have to make the same dishes repeatedly? I can’t post the same recipe twice in a row, especially since I last shared it only last week. On top of that, squid only comes in three-pound boxes, so I made a triple batch. That meant spending the afternoon chopping onions and parsley, grating tomatoes, and cleaning squid — all work that doesn’t produce neat, separate blog content.
What did I do with the free time I had this morning? Also by popular demand (persistent begging), I spent part of the morning making Paula Deen’s Not Your Mama’s Banana Pudding. Even though the recipe title says “Not Mama’s,” I try not to post non-Greek recipes on this site, which is dedicated to Mama’s Greek cooking. Maybe I should have a separate non-Greek blog — Lulu’s Kitchen, perhaps — but I can barely keep up with Mama’s Taverna, so that seems unlikely. Making the pudding was another delicious but unbloggable effort for this site.
The recipe yielded a huge amount of rich pudding, so I took half to my parents. My mom looked at it and said, “We can’t eat all that!” My dad’s smile suggested he disagreed — he thought they could easily finish it — but my mom tends to ration him, so she’s experimenting with freezing some portions. After that I toured their garden with them, admiring ferns emerging and the tomato plants in their tiny greenhouse (“On sale for only $30 — stick your hand in and feel how hot it is in there!”).
Still, I wonder how other food bloggers manage to keep up a constant stream of new recipes.
UPDATE: The pudding is delicious!