I’ve moved into the house of an expatriate Slovenian bootlegger and as soon as I’ve set up a rotisserie, it feels like home again.
If there is a single item of cookware that I could be trapped with on a desert island, it would be the rotisserie, although only if there was an indigenous chicken or lamb population. Cooking a whole chicken any other way cheats you of pleasure. The above chicken was rubbed with salt, ground cumin and pepper. There is no recipe, just add any quantity of those two spices and mineral together, rub it on a plump dead chicken and rotate the chicken over fire.
There’s been multiple posts of late rueing the mutual slump in food blogging mojo in Australia. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been renovating a house and the only thing less entertaining than manual labour is having someone tell you about manual labour in great detail when you’re expecting some sort of food narrative. How home renovation manages to survive as a genre of television is bewildering to me. Then again, it’s not as if I’ve been posting frequently or in depth at lastappetite.com in the preceding months.
So what has happened to Australian food blogging? Is it part of a wider trend or just the people whom I read? Is the smoke haze affecting the food? Financial crisis? I wrote about food blogging being dead at the start last year but maybe it is actually coming to fruition.
I have a slight confession to make, Phil: I actually totally can’t stand the majority of food blogs. I stick to the ones I put on the TBZ blog roll. I don’t know about a cultural slump in food blogging. I know that from my end things have been hectic and uncertain, and I’ve barely had time to buy groceries, let alone cook dinner, photograph and write about it. Could it be that waxing lyrical about domesticity gets tiresome, especially in the context of a frightening financial crisis?
The flip side of that is that now, more than ever, it’s important that we think about what we eat, how we eat and where we get it from. Also, we need you to continue coating things in french fries and putting them on sticks.
I get the feeling that all the food bloggers that I read at the moment are hectic – but for completely different reasons. I can’t see if anything is connecting it all or not. One of the weird things that slows me down at the moment is available light. I work longer hours (and care more about my photos) and never get home in time to photograph food in daylight. Hence the greenish glow on the above chicken.
As for deep-frying and impaling things, I hope that neither of these things constitutes my only contribution to humanity.
It’s funny in 2005 there seemed to be a lot more vibrancy and contact. I actually put it down to saturation, that we can only follow so many blogs and compared to 30 or so back then there must be 250+ including various commercial ones.
Some of us are distracted with twitter for link type posts where the mainstream, which never really took to food blogging, are joining conversations now.
Personally, being asked to write for the Hun two years ago slowed me down as I felt it my duty to give stories to them first and now that it over perhaps I can get my mojo back.
You on for the BBQ at The Commoner of Saturday. It’s proof that there is still life out there.
If anything now is the best time ever to blog with many of us likely to have more time on our hands and really make something interesting of our blogs.
I think Ed’s right. I started out reading political junky op-ed type blogs, and there was a real shift there in about 2007 when the participation level jumped so high that a sense of intimacy was lost. I noticed the same time-lag in the spats around professional -vs-amateurs conflicts between hard copy media food writers and bloggers that we saw in late 2007/early 2008.
And yes, I’m hectic too, because my youngest son doesn’t sleep in the middle of the day anymore, and that’s my blogging/dinner prep time gone. *sigh*
Phil, you need not worry about the chips on sticks being your legacy. In our house, you are the stab blender mayo guy.
Yes, light has something to do with it too although I thin we all blog more while we hibernate in winter – despite the light.
And perhaps this has something to do with it too – “paid bloggers to become the norm”– in B&T newsletter on p. 2, via @jenius
Wish I was the clever person (advertised on p 5) getting paid the big bucks to give a 45 minute natter on how to tell their arse from a blog …