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THE RELUCTANT GOURMET

If you lose it, your family will probably have to live on dal and rice for a frightening amount of time. Or if you’re Michel Chu, on Tuna Noodle Casserole.

Michael says he used “to store his recipes (laboriously tested and perfected over many trials) on a palm handheld device.” He would then go to work and synchronise it to outlook. Unfortunately the office server ended up deleting all his recipes. Except for the one on how to make a Tuna Noodle Casserole. So he created a blog, ‘Cooking for Engineers’ and it became one of the most popular of 4000 contestants at the 2007 Weblog awards. And he’s just one of the thousands of food bloggers who are actively read, discussed and followed by large groups of readers every single day.

Food blogging has become an incredibly powerful way to connect: joining people from across continents, cultures, languages and professions.

Non-political, rarely controversial and always friendly, it’s the virtual equivalent of swapping recipes and cooking tips, ideas and opinions in a warm, fragrant kitchen with a friend over coffee. Only here, your friend can be a high-powered celebrity chef from France. Or a teenager specialising in cupcakes from Denmark. Or, like the writer of ‘Bad Home Cooking: A food blog with a twist of incompetence’ an eternally optimistic struggling home-cook.

Their names are not the only reason why this whole new genre of writing is so interesting, though that’s a start. Look at a sample: ‘Is My Blog Burning’, ‘Chubby Hubby’, ‘French Tart’, ‘Chocolate and Zucchini’, ‘Men In Aprons’ and ‘The Girl Who Ate Everything.’

They are also a way to get startlingly real, often very well written, disarmingly honest slices of life from around the world. Take the author of ‘Counting Sheep’ who calls herself ‘a former toadie in the IT world until they paid me to go away.’ She then went to culinary school, got a degree and now teaches cooking “all over the Boston area.”

For people who are learning to cook, or foodies interested in new recipes, there is a burgeoning number of bloggers who experiment in the kitchen and then give step-by-step recipes, accompanied by pictures.

A vast improvement on cookery books, in some ways, because they’re written by regular people who warn you about difficulty levels and what could go wrong. Also, most recipes are followed by enthusiastic online discussions, where you can get answers to almost anything that confuses you — in the kitchen.

When ‘Running With Tweezers: Tales from the frontlines of food’ talked of how she struggled with making a Japanese breakfast, she got responses from around the world, ranging from tips on creating a perfect miso soup to some nuggets of everyday life in another food culture, such as the lady who spoke of her daughter who eats “a lot of egg with rice and seaweed sprinkles.” The variety is precisely why blogging events throw up such interesting results.

‘Traveller’s Lunch Box’ asked people to give a short list of ‘things you’ve eaten and think that everyone should eat at least once before they die. Think of it as kind of a global food guide, which can enrich and inform our travels and perhaps even clue us into things closer to home that we’ve somehow overlooked.’

There were almost 1700 entries, which included ‘Frog legs gigged on a hot summers night from our own fish ponds,’ ‘My Japanese home stay mother’s sukiyaki, Takayama, Japan,’ ‘Rasgullas from Calcutta’ and ‘Bananas on the island of St. Lucia in the West Indies.’

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