Project Food Blog

I'm supposed to write a blog entry about why I should be the next food blog star. To be honest, I've been slacking pretty hard on food blogging over the past year, and I'm hoping that entering this contest will be a good way for me to get back into the swing of things.

When I first started this blog, it was way back in early 2007, and I was a single mom of an extremely picky eight-year-old son. My sister and her family had come to visit, and for dinner we ended up throwing together a bunch of stuff and calling it "Yum Yum Chicken Enchilada Casserole." I figured I'd create an online cookbook of sorts, chronicling my recipe successes and Table for Two was born. About a month later I started dating the man who would later become my husband, and I finally had an appreciative audience for my gastronomical experiments. Once my boyfriend/future husband and his daughter moved in, Table for Two actually became a table for four.

Over time, I started to get frustrated with meal planning - I'd try a new recipe from a cookbook, or come up with something original, and the kids grumbled. If it wasn't pizza or chicken nuggets, they didn't want to have anything to do with it. We decided to have the kids pitch in by making them each cook one dinner per month. We bought a couple of kid-friendly cookbooks, and at first they jumped in wholeheartedly. After cooking once or twice, though, they lost interest and it became just another chore.

For this FoodBuzz-sponsored contest, I plan on getting the kids excited again about cooking by making them the stars of my food blog. I'll chronicle their cooking successes and failures, and by extension, my successes and failures as a teacher. And maybe along the way I'll be able to recapture my enthusiasm for creative cooking, too.