Thanks for Visiting!

Hello, friends! This is just a short, personal note to say thanks for visiting Simply Cooked, or liking us on Facebook. In the last four months the blog has had over 10,000 page views each month! This is a huge milestone for me and I'm so excited. Plus, there are more than 300 people subscribed to the blog by email or RSS feed.


My next goal is to increase the interactivity on the Simply Cooked Facebook page. I think it could be a great place to share easy, tasty recipe ideas. Anyone can post there, so I hope you will. Next time you find something interesting around the web, please share it with the Simply Cooked community by posting it there. Or share your kitchen ideas.

New Business Cards for Simply Cooked

I have ordered some new business cards today using the superb service from Moo. The card stock they use is heavy and glossy and the print quality is excellent. I have used them before and loved the results. Last week I ran out of Simply Cooked cards so I decided that it was time to order new ones with rounded corners. And I am thrilled that this time they include QR codes!

The Kitchen Reader

One of the highlights of my month is participating in The Kitchen Reader book group. Each month we read a food-related book, and share our reviews. The books we have read have varied from food classics such as My Life in France by Julia Child, to restaurant narratives, for example Heat by Bill Burford, and home cooking tales, such as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barabara Kingsolver. Each book I've read has been informative and entertaining, and the other group members always have something funny or insightful to say--and they have become dear friends as well.


I'm thrilled to be taking over the leadership of The Kitchen Reader. And I want to invite you to join us! In March we are reading Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain and we plan to share our reviews on March 31. Please visit the group's blog and then join in with us!

welcome!

Thanks for joining me over here at my new cooking blog. To start things off, I have imported 57 cooking posts from the archives of my personal blog. Hopefully this means that meals with sarah will become a complete, searchable, growing collection of my experiments in the kitchen. The food here is home cooked and healthy (for the most part!).


I have been editing the old posts slightly to be more food focused and have also given some of them more descriptive titles. The full archived posts with comments about family, scenic photos, or non-food topics are still part of my personal blog. The posts here are also relabelled so that finding a recipe you remember or a new one to try should be much easier. You can use the labels or the search bar to help you do this.

Welcome to meals with sarah! The first new post for this blog is next, also published today. I love blogging and hope that you will feel free to comment with ideas, suggestions, questions, or comments.

four great places to get food inspiration

There are lots of places on the web from which to get cooking ideas. Here are four of my favourites.

1. The Kitchn
This a big cooking blog with writers in the US, Canada, and (at least one!) in Europe. What I like about The Kitchn is that the posts are very accessible and friendly, with a community discussion feel. They always have nice ideas to share, but also talk about their cooking failures. I have enjoyed reading, for example, about what they tried when too many cucumbers built up in the fridge.

2. Cookthink
This is a searchable recipe database that lets you type in keywords such as ingredients, meal type, cuisine type, or even your mood. The recipes that come up are invariably very good. At the moment, it's still a small-ish database, but all of the handful of recipes I have tried so far have been excellent. Last night i made Seared Cumin Lemon Lamb Chops, which was easy and delicious. There are always suggestions of what recipes would go with the one you are viewing, and also an informative weekly email newsletter that spotlights an interesting ingredient and how to use it.

3. Bitten
I am new to Mark Bittman and his writings in the New York Times Dining and Wine section, but I loved his post about how to make mix-and-match rice salads.

4. Other Bloggers
I read the blogs of other food-lovers, like Clotilde at Chocolate and Zucchini and David on Book the Cook. My friends blog about food on their personal sites, too, like Sonya (her's is a gated blog, so email her [or me] to get added to her readership). I also see some interesting food-related stuff on Facebook, like Carolyn's homemade wholewheat pasta.

Foodies, tell me, are there any great cooking sites online that you like to look to for inspiration?

PS. You do not need to be a Blogger member to be able to comment. Furthermore, if you comment you can use your name or remain anonymous as you wish.