POOGS Favorite Food Blogs For Janet: See

One of my absolutely favorite pastimes is sharing with you, total strangers who might appreciate my fabulous experiences.  This list of below is the result of many grueling nights, wrapped in cashmere, sipping a warm toddy, perusing literally thousands of food blogs. Here are my favorites:

Foggy Doggy
For six years, Mike Jenson, has been blogging about cooking gourmet dog biscuits and cocktails in his well-appointed, but tiny Shoreditch studio.  Some of the recipes he features, actually all of them, are riduculously complicated and involved hard to find and expensive exotic components, like distillation of sumac.  The main ingredient that sets these doggy treats apart however, is the special brew of home made vodka that he adds to each and every biscuit (hence the eponymous Foggy Doggy). But, the results are out of this (doggy) world. Mike's shaggy dog storytelling style and heartfelt desire to share his hard work to spare us some are genuinely endearing. My favorite post, "How to turn a Bucket of Rotten Potatos in the Perfect Canine Cosmo" makes me ever to eager to find him a book publisher whose design department is good enough to create a coffeetable book of his recipes that I can feature on POOG.

Frank Bites
For starters, this is one of the most profoundly beautiful food blogs out there. Frank Abouzeidiemetelschmidt is a videographer, food stylist and tumblr who travels around the world even though you can't. His videos are fast-paced, cutting edge artistic interpretations of what food would look like if it moved on its own. His edgy filming of flash fried Vishnatha spinach is the best visual interpretation of flash fried Vishnatha spinach that I've ever seen. And, just when I thought that he's reached the acme of videotaping food production, he surprised me with his "Souffle in Slow Motion," a Muybridge-like short that makes you want to reach out and at least touch, if not taste, the screen.

Crepes and Cretins
Sometimes it's hard to remember that even people who are not too bright like good food. And Crepes and Cretins has come along just at the right time to remind the rest of us that they do.  Their blog entries are short, practical and include everday ingredients to make simple, everyday food for simpletons.  Most of the recipes are creative redos of timeless classics such as thyme scrambled eggs (add thyme), gourmet Hawaiian pizza (add pineapple), nutella and strawberry crepes (add nutella and strawberrys to your crepes) and garlic roasted chicken (add garlic). It's no surprise that their entries read like short stories taken straight from the pages of The Joy of Cooking.

Limb-Ho!
Tiny Limb's blog is not a food blog, but a blog about people who love food. It's fun because she doesn't care what they're eating but instead focuses on what they look like while they eat because, after all, who wants to look at someone unattractive scarf down dinner. She is first a foremost my favorite dining stylist (she styled my last dinner party and it was the BEST looking I've ever had).  When you are looking for someone to make your dinner party sparkle with fabulous looking guests think of Limb.

What Janet Eats
See Janet eat.  This text over action photojournal of Janet and her favorite foods is not to be missed for their unique and wonderful take on Janet and her food preferences styled circa Goodhousekeeping 1974. We forget how challenging the creation and provision of fun and yummy food for the family was women in the early 70s as they faced the rising tide of the effects of the sexual revolution and blouses that knotted into really ugly bows at the neck. What Janet Eats takes us back to that time with none of the cultural baggage, leaving us with beautiful images of food against time-treasured backdrops of avocado coloured kitches and faux wood panelled dining rooms. She uses tried-and-true 70s food to create edible historic montages.

Madagascar Spice
Blues Jennas is a food writer, fashion illustrator and writer who grew up in an English tea house in what was once Bombay. A few years ago, she began experimenting with creating delicious dairy-free, sugar-free, gluten-free, peanut-free high afternoon teas, an effort that unfortunately failed, but fortunately resulted in her marvelous blog relating her seven year trials and tribulations. Each attempt is worse than the next in terms of taste, but the photography is beautiful and the Haikus and illustrations that accompany each recipe will make you cry. I especially love her discription of the dairy-ree, sugar-free, gluten-free, peanut-free cranberry scone:

Small juicy berries
Drifting in empty bowls
Filled by nothingness

Just Like Moms
Making dinner every night has been women's work for...ever. But now, thanks to a dad that makes dinner, we get to learn about how challenging it is to work and go home to create beautiful, nutritious and fun meals for the family even when you're exhausted, don't want to,. have not ingredietns and have a husband, or wife in this case, that works out of the house. Yet somehow Amir Toff manages to do just that with grace and humor and his iPhone.  His intrepid ordering of exotic take out is chronicled in the voice and via the charming antics of his humourously renamed wife and sons: Intrepid, Explorer and Sunshine. His menu links are fabulous (all you need for dinner is a PDF reader! Acrobat's 9.0 downloadable version is free). His mantra at the close of every post, "Why should I cook?" seems pretty good to me.