furlinedteacup

How Pinterest has Changed the Way I Share Links on the Web

I was a latecomer to Pinterest, having fallen in love with the reblogging charm of tumblr . But as you can see from the tumbleweeds rolling through my tumblr page, I've changed course and have pretty much moved over to Pinterest instead for my content sharing.

What prompted this change? Although I love the content being shared on tumblr, I never had the ability to really slice and dice what I was sharing by topic. With Pinterest,not only am I able to do just that, I'm also able to easily visually scan the content I've shared, which is especially handy for the hundreds of recipes I've bookmarked in web browsers and my google Reader RSS feed reader over the years.

For all the foodie content I'd been hoarding, I started up three separate boards: cocktails, cook this, and baked treats. Then for the miscellaneous geekery , I have star wars, hello kitty and geekery boards. I even started one to save all the interesting infographics I inevitably share and can't put my finger on ever again. Then I tackled my travel photo stash, and made a Pinterest board for my travels, focusing just on a photo or two that captures a specific place/moment in time, and one for windows since they are so often a topic for my photography.

I feel bad about having been neglecting my tumblr. Because it was a ton of fun for a number of months. But at this point, it doesn't make sense to me to be keeping up two profiles that basically are focused on the same activity, so you'll be finding me on Pinterest instead. Hope to see you there.

To Make

I'm always collecting bookmarks for a number of yummy treats. Not sure what  I want to bake this weekend, so I've been clicking through to see if anything causes me to lick my lips, and these all sound promising...

• Smitten Kitchen's Chocolate Yogurt Snack Cakes. It was the bite-size presentation that sucked me in since I always try to bake minis of anything I am bringing to work to share. And the idea of a lighter chocolate treat meets a warm summer's day snack requirements.
• Chow's Marble Cheesecake Bars look cool, creamy and delicious.
• Serious Eats' Pain au Chocolat Cinnamon Rolls with Crème Fraîche Icing and Walnuts seem to be a lot easier to prepare than they look (thanks to being cheaty and using premade puff pastry.)
• A coworker brought in her copy of Cook Yourself Thin so I could try making some of the banana muffins. She as *really* trying to get me to make the red velvet cake that uses beets, but that just seems wrong to me.

While I try to decide if baking snacks today>heating up the kitchen, I'm going to have a Stirrings Lemon Drop. Ah, summer...

Making Homemade Pasta

When I first brought home Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking , I dove in to the recipes for homemade pasta, determined to try my hand at it. But it never happened. You see, I am cursed with a galley kitchen, its limited counterspace eaten up by my convection oven, Kitchen Aide mixer, and espresso machine.

I am also cursed with the need to see visual demonstrations of new cooking techniques in order to understand and execute on them. Marcella's books were beautifully written, but didn't give me much guidance.

Fast forward. KQED's foodie blog has a step-by-step pictorial on making pasta. It gave me the visual queues I needed to get the process. Now if only someone can help me double my counterspace...

Chocolate Bread

NPR's Kitchen Window recently ran a great story and a tempting recipe for chocolate bread. I think I'll try it this weekend.

REMINDER TO SELF: subscribe to the Kitchen Window podcast already!

A Kid in a Candy Store...

Bay area Bites visited SF's Candy Store, and came back with mouth watering photos. This is going to be a must-visit for a certain candy addict's birthday.

Tony Bourdain's Top Chef blog

I've been a big fan of Tony Bourdain's food writing since my first glimpse of Kitchen Confidential. Which means his recent Bravo TV blogging has made me happy. He wrote a highly entertaining recap of last night's Top Chef that you should go read now. It includes a great P.S. directed to Rocco DiSpirito.

Human-assisted Web Search

I've long said my ideal job would be to help folks with Internet search. I have a special knack for weeding through search results with a deftly built query, honing in on the information folks are looking for.

Now the guy who founded weblogs.com has gone and founded Mahalo, apparently a company full of people like me helping create a better search experience. If only they weren't based in Santa Monica...

Foodies go from famine to feast with more food portals than you can keep up with

I was so excited when CHOW, my favorite food magazine ever, found new life as a marvelous website (that coincidentally features the fabulous design skills of my foodie friend Olivia). But work and life keep me so busy I don't get over there as often as I would like to read and be inspired to cook new things.

And now yahoo! has jumped into the foodie fray, launching http://food.yahoo.com/ this week. It aggregates content from a variety of other sources (like Rachel Ray, Food and Wine, and Martha Stewart), including some food bloggers.

I can' really quite get a handle on how I'd use the site yet -- there's just so much stuff crammed into the homepages/landing pages. And you have to navigate carefully to avoid searching an advertiser's website rather than one of the food.yahoo tools.

I tried out the "dining guide" and was not impressed. How can a normal person wade through 8989  results? They tell you to click through for reviews on yahoo local...but if you can't click to sort by some sort of criteria, you're really not giong to be able to find a restaurant, are you? If it was a small town with 10 restaurants the dump of search results might work, but for a major city like San Francisco, this is nowhere near being a dining guide.

I looked around for some time to try to find an "about us" type of page, to see what the mission of this new mini portal is, exactly. But I never found one. I did find a page full of foodie blogger posts tho, so that at least gave me some non-repurposed content to look at.

My best guess is they were aiming to create a one-stop reference/resource for foodies, but it doesn't quite hit the mark with me.