Blog Ideas Just Drop From the Sky, Right? #150+.

Any time someone finds out that I write a food blog, they invariably ask how I come up with topics and recipes, week in, week out. It came up today. Caroline, a young woman I work with asked just that this afternoon. I told her ideas just drop from the sky. She laughed; but I was only half joking. I have no trouble coming up with things to write about, but I do have a problem coming up with enough time to cook and write. I was thinking about it while driving home from work and realized that in the past 10 months or so I've written more than 150 food-related short essays. Posted them here. Sheesh.

Should be in every good cook's kitchen, and on
every recipe developers bookshelf.

Ideas come from everywhere. A trip to a market and a pile of gorgeous red peppers in late Summer can start the ball rolling. A book, like Page & Dornenberg's "The Flavor Bible" can get me off on a cooking tangent. It's something I really like because it isn't a book of recipes, its full of ideas about what foods go together, a great jumping off spot. I highly recommend taking a look at it. A conversation with another cook about a family favorite will get something germinating, too.

Sometimes it's interesting to analyze something we take for granted, like good knives, or the herbs in our gardens that come back each year like chives or thyme. Other times I'm focused on what the garden is producing, like too many hot peppers, or an upcoming holiday feast.

It sure helps that I work in a kitchenware store, surrounded with coworkers and customers who are all about food. It also helps to have hundreds of cookbooks, collected over 40 years. Often, all I have to do is look at the cover and that reminds me of a recipe in that book that I made over, and over, for several years and then totally forgot about.

This post came from my commute home, sitting in traffic, and thinking how many times over and over I do certain things and I never get bored with them.  Like this. That's when I realized that I've written more than 150 blog posts this year and I feel like I've just exposed the tip of the iceberg. Inspiration really does just drop from the sky, doesn't it? Now if I could just give up sleeping, or make my day 28 hours long, I might have enough time in this lifetime to tell you about it all.