The Prolific Blogger Award

It strikes me as somewhat ironic that I sat down to write a(nother) post apologising for my slackness in the blogging department of late, only to remember that I was recently named in the "Prolific Blogger Awards" by my friend Debbie Cowens.Yes, it has in fact been a month since I last posted here, so no, I don't really deserve an award that suggests I blog an awful lot. A year ago that was so. But a lot has happened in the past year.

My excuse this month for not blogging has been quite simple: I have had far more important writing work to get done. There are only so many hours in the day and writing fiction has been taking up most of my time when I'm not working or being a family guy. There, excuses made and moving on.

Nonetheless, I'm not one to turn down a prize. I believe there are cream buns at the awards ceremony, so I won't be doing myself out of free cream buns.

The idea is that I must go on to praise seven other bloggers (yeah, it's not the most exclusive of clubs) and give them the same award. At last count, there were at least 150 other registered winners. Seems to me a bit like one of those lotteries you get in the mailbox that promises you've already won, but I'm not going to let that worry me. Cream buns, man!

Unfortunately, I'm fairly sure that most of the bloggers I read don't read me back, and Debbie has already chosen most of the good ones who do. Full cred to Jenni, Morgue, and Tim for getting their invitation to eat cream buns with us.

I'll add a few more to the list, bloggers who really are prolific and whom I think will actually read this post:

Off-Black - Random musings of a 30-something guy from The Hutt;

Undulating Ungulate - Also random but somewhat darker musings of the mildly anarchic, in the nicest possible way;

The Alligator Love - The trials and tribulations of a chef in Washington State, USA, just trying to find a way back to NZ before his car really eats him;

and last but not least...

Strong-light - More slice of life stuff from Morgue's better half; short, sweet and to the point.

Prolific Blogger Award Rules | ONE: Every winner is expected to pass on this award to at least seven other deserving prolific bloggers. | TWO: Each Prolific Blogger is asked to link to the blog from which he/she has received this award. | THREE: Every Prolific Blogger is asked to link back to this post, which explains the origins of the award. | FOUR: Every Prolific Blogger is asked to visit the post listed in rule #3 and add his/her name to the “Mr. Linky” at the bottom.

Just like Debbie, I don't expect the above prolific bloggers to list seven bloggers, unless they wish to do so. :-)

Add One Year, Freshly Ground

They call it a Blogiversary.

Seriously.

Crazy, I know.

Nonetheless, whatever it might be termed, I have reached my first ... Blogiversary. (Officially it's tomorrow, the 18th, but I feel it's going to be a busy one so I'm posting this right now!)

I started this blog not because I thought anyone would have any interest in anything I had to say, but because I needed somewhere to keep my recipes. I have a habit of making stuff up as I go along in the kitchen, and then people would ask me how I made it, and I'd say "well..."

So thanks to the generosity of Google Blogger, Freshly Ground was born.

Apparently, some people have even gone on to cook the recipes I've posted. That's cool.

So, without any more inane chatter (which seems to make up the bulk of this blog, despite its pretenses to being about food) I'm going to rattle off a few statistics and high points.

After writing about legendary fantasy cult author Hugh Cook and his struggle with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, I had the honour of being asked by his family to write an obituary for him. I did this, and the obituary was published in the New Zealand Herald. Were it not for Freshly Ground, I would never have had the opportunity to do homage to this writer whom I greatly admired. To Hugh's family, my eternal gratitude and love.

Running a blog also introduced me to the whole world of the internet, which up until then had always been a blurry and occasionally useful thing, usually for looking up odd words or researching obscure points of history or science. Apart from everything I learned about the publishing world thanks to this post (kindly supplied by my good friend Morgue), I also discovered audiobooks and podcasts. The addition of posting audiobook/podcast reviews came pretty naturally. I was also rewarded with the buzz of making the acquaintance of the writers I had reviewed when they came and left comments, and of trading tweets with those writers on Twitter.

Yes, it led me to Twitter too. Now, I don't know how I survived without it before (I know, it's sad and desperate, but it's an addiction I simply must feed).

This has also led to my latest piece of cool news, which is that emuse-zine have invited me to submit reviews for publication in their quarterly ezine. That's pretty cool too, and I'm looking forward to making the most of the opportunity.

Last year also saw, at long last, the publication of a collaborative work of poetry and short stories that had been on the back burner for nine years. Its final, harrowing birth was brought about, in large part, by my getting into the online world and finding a long-lost friend. If you haven't checked out Urban Driftwood yet, head over to Lulu and take a look.

Now for the stats:

Total Unique Visitors: 5,838 (Average 16/Day)

Total Page Loads: 8,351 (Average 23/Day)

Busiest Month: April 2009 (804 Unique Visitors; Average 27/Day)

Busiest Day: April 5th 2009 - 65 Unique Visitors. This was the day I posted my review of the Audiobook Drama Hoad's Grim. Thanks to Jack Kincaid for putting it out there on Twitter and driving the visitors to me.

Most visited page: The Ultimate Homemade Beef Burger Recipe. Somehow, this page seems to have made its way onto just about every food search engine in the world, because I get visitors from all sorts of random places, making a beeline to FG to learn how they can make the Ultimate Beef Burger. Eat up, I say.

At time of publishing this post, I had 8 Followers (Hi, Followers!) and 15 Subscribers in Google Reader.

Freshly Ground is rated 814,775 on Technorati. Awesome. If you're a Technorati member and think I deserve some love there, please swing by and throw me a bone. I'll give you back all the love I can, I promise.

So thanks everyone, for taking the time to come by and validate my existence here. I hope I've been entertaining.

And that's about it. Throughout the year we've laughed, we've cried, I've ranted, I've raved, and here's to another of the same, only bigger and better. Hopefully you'll all join me on the way.

Twittering from the Rooftops

I've joined the warbling crowd in the Twittersphere.

You can find me here.

I can't say that I'll have anything useful to say; after all, 140 characters is barely enough time for me to get up to speed, much less get even the least bit witty or thoughtful.

But I will be using it to transmit some of the tastier morsels I find in my webby travels that don't make it as far as this blog, things that people might like to read or hear about that might otherwise slip them by.

I'm also using it to listen to the sounds of the internet breathing.

If you're already on, click through to me, and I'll come visit you too.

Altogether now.... TwitterTwitterTwitterTwitterTwitterTwitterTwitterTwitter....

Now ssshhhh.

Garden Update

I've made a lot of noise about growing your own garden, and how easy it is for everyone to get something green sprouting in whatever little space they have. My own efforts have, admittedly, been a bit hit-and-miss over the past few years, apart from fresh herbs and making compost. But since herbs are really just weeds with a useful side that's not saying terribly much, and you can't eat compost.

So when I started this blog, I decided I should really make a proper go of it myself, and got out planting.

Well, we've had successes and failures. The strawberry plant didn't fruit this year, to our untold sadness. We grew one beautiful broccoli, but were so proud of it that we didn't realise it was ready to eat, and it went to seed on the doorstep.

But I put a whole lot of pumpkin seeds down in a bunch of compost, and fed it all with lots of worm castings, and waited.
Then when the season turned, the garden suddenly came to life. Amongst the things growing up around the weeds were more pumpkin plants than I could count. My ulterior motive with growing the pumpkin plants was a lazy one really: I hoped that they would spread out and strangle all the weeds. It seems to be working.
Then these started to appear.
And then a few of these. Yesterday I counted 11 fruits growing in the pumpkin patch, as well as a few errant tomatoes that may or may not survive the strangling effects of the pumpkins.
Dessert Chef's potted tomato plants have also been shooting up, and with judicious applications of stakes, worm castings, water, compost, and a careful trim, they might be the big success story of the summer.
They've also popped out a bunch of these
And even a few of these.
And the random potatoes I planted in the back yard near the pumpkins have been our first proper harvest. Straight from the garden, we cooked these up the other night, and they were just beautiful. So much more flavour than the ones from the shop, or even from the market. You could almost taste the compost and the worm wees.

Hmm, maybe that's not what I'm really trying to say.

Anyway, I'm pleased to say that it looks like our efforts have not been in vain. There's also rhubarb growing, and onions, though I have to say I'm not sure what to do with those.

We'll see. I've put down more potatoes, and now I've got a better idea of what I need to do to get ready for the next planting season.

Now that wasn't so hard, was it?

And the time has gone... where?

Here we are in December already. Tomorrow's my last day of work for the year, next week is Christmas, then 2008 rolls over into 2009 and we start all over again.

It's time to wrap it up and decide where we've come in the past 12 months.

I have no complaints to mention (barring the political, but this is not the time), and I'm awfully grateful for that. I know that a lot of people have had a much worse year than we have, and we have done our best to support friends and even strangers through these hard times. Financially we've been pretty well insulated from the worst of things, so for that too we're very thankful.

As a family we came a long way. Isaac is now almost 2, and what a year of changes and lessons that has been. It can be characterised primarily by the number of things that have been altered in our house to accommodate him: A fence was built, we replaced one pane of glass with safety glass after a smashing incident, latches have been put on windows and doors, and Daddy now has to be careful to tidy up all the cr@p he used to leave around the yard.

I started a blog, to my own surprise, and to my even greater surprise, the novelty hasn't worn off and I'm even still posting here. This is the first time that I've really appreciated the internet as more than just an online dictionary and encyclopedia. This year I have discovered that out there in Webland there is a community. Hi, y'all.

Writing Freshly Ground has made me more aware of the issues out there surrounding food, and given me a voice to raise my views with more than just the guests of a given evening. It has also allowed me to share all the recipes I've been making up over the years, and what with the photos and all it gives the false impression that I might even be able to cook. But I won't let that get around.

I've also hit a fair few landmarks with my writing work, which only happens in and around work-work and family life, but I try to prioritise it as much as possible. I have completed a third draft of my novel and started the long and arduous process of sounding out an (increasingly less stable) publishing industry to try to get said novel read by an agent. This is more work than it sounds. But once again, I have discovered the online community of writers, agents, editors, and publishers, who are more than willing to share a wealth of information with the rest of the community about what they should or should not be doing. It has been one h~ll of an eye-opening journey. I won't say that it has been discouraging thus far, but it is at the very least massively daunting. One thing is clear: there's no point even starting into it with subpar writing, so lots of revision is underway. It's amazing how much more critical you can be of your own work when you think someone with an opinion that can make or break you might be reading it. Give me that big red pen...

Also, Urban Driftwood was finally completed and made available in print form. I have some plans to release it as a PDF in the new year, so watch this space if you haven't laid your hands on a hard copy yet.

Putting politics aside, I had a great twelve months, and I'm looking forward to more good times to come. The garden is going crazy, and hopefully by next planting season I'll have more of a clue about how to manage the little space we have to get some really sustainable crops ticking over, so that we can rely even more on ourselves and less on the carbon footprint of stores and markets. I keep thinking about building a chicken run, but I really have to clean up the yard before I can even consider that seriously. A big shout out to Obi for slapping up the shelves in the garage this week - that's the first step! Next we need to put some up in the tin shed.

Which brings me to next year. Over the summer we have some jobs to do, like painting the roof and fixing the drive, but what do I see in the next twelve months for me, and for us? Well, I'm already racing along a fairly complex trajectory of paid work, writing work, and stuff around home, so I'm not going to sign myself up for too much more just yet. If 1 going on 2 was hard work, just imagine what 2 going on 3 will be like! And with any luck, sometime soon we might be lucky enough to have another little bundle of joy in the house. Which is of course something that is not really in our hands.

We're also looking forward to at least one wedding in the new year, and a visit from LBS and Uncle Carlo in March. We don't really need to plan on getting busy and racing through another year; it's just going to happen.

Freshly Ground will continue in sporadic bursts over the next two weeks, around Christmas and New Years and maybe a little excursion to the South Island or something, but come January things will be back in full swing.

So take care everyone, have a safe and happy holiday, and either keep warm or wear sunscreen, depending on what part of the world you happen to be in.

Anniversary Pork

I've made mention in the past about how I reckon that I can cook at least as well as the places we can afford to go out to eat, if not a little better (IMHO). But that's not to say we don't like to go out to eat, not by any means. However, there are certain harsh realities that simply must be faced, and I'm sure that a lot of people out there have been there too. Since we went from the lazy hazy life of a working couple to the non-stop rigours of parenthood, we've found ourselves short both the time and the money to go out to dinner very often. I can recall one night out at a restaurant since Isaac came along, not counting family affairs.

It's at times like this that I really appreciate that someone, somewhere along the way, taught me how to cook. Besides what my mum drummed into me, a lot of my culinary skills I picked up by trial and error, from waiting and bar jobs in the hospitality industry, and a fair amount I've just made up as I went along and hoped it turned out well, but all those things add up. I've read lots of cookbooks (and then ignored a lot of recipes), watched a lot of TV cooking shows (and been equal parts awed and incredulous by what I've seen - for example, who really uses all those little glass bowls for prepped ingredients? People with paid kitchenhands, I'd say. But I digress.), talked to butchers and chefs, tried lots of different things when we did go out, listened to the cooking guests on the radio, and more recently, read lots of other food blogs.

I will point out at this point that before starting Freshly Ground, I had read one blog. I had no idea what a cooking blog looked like, so I pretty much allowed myself to create my own format here. Thus the food, the politics, the ramblings, the humour (or so I like to think of it). Freshly Ground is a food blog because food is something that I find integrally important to so many aspects of life: Health, Family, Economics, the Environment, Entertainment. It could have been any number of things, but food is something that, while not being any sort of catering professional, I'm rather passionate about and can write about with at least a modicum of experience and authority. And if anyone disagrees with me, well, that's just a matter of taste, isn't it?

Do I have a point (you'll be starting to wonder, I'm sure)?

The point is that recently we had our wedding anniversary, and for the reasons mentioned above, we didn't treat ourselves to a night out; instead, we stayed home and I cooked up a roast pork. Did we feel like we'd missed out on something special? Not at all. As usual, I just made up dinner as I went along, dragging together whatever I could find in the cupboards and garden.

It's not about being able to go out and blow a hundred bucks on dinner. It's about sharing good food with good people.

I've covered all the basics of roasting pork already, with one minor addendum: after the initial salt crusting, wash the salt off. Yip. Sounds obvious, doesn't it. Did to me too, when I was told. Ah, well. So to make things interesting, I decided to crust the pork in something a bit more flavoursome than flour.
I coated the pork with olive oil and dressed it with: Freshly ground pepper, chopped fresh sage leaves, dukkah, brown sugar, cider vinegar, and a dusting of semolina flour.
Then I deliberately salted the rind to make it go extra crispy and placed the meat in an oven dish on a raised tray and popped it in the oven at 210C. After 20 minutes I turned the oven down to 190C and cooked for a further 3 1/2 hours, turning the meat and basting every 40 minutes or so.
I always let the meat rest out of the oven for 5-10 minutes before carving.
The end result was a bit spicier than Dessert Chef likes, but with a roast this big, its pretty easy to find slices everyone will enjoy. The best thing about this, of course, is that it went on to feed us leftovers for lunch and dinner for two or three days.

So here's my final point: you don't need to pay big money to eat well. You have the power in your hands. Use it.

Trawling the Net

Just stopped by gallimaufree and read this post, which sums up really well many of the things I've been yammering on about over the past few months. Seems to be a site dedicated to the more benign elements of self-reliance and survivalism, with a focus on:

building a non-secret society of nice people who respond to disasters, catastrophes, and apocalypses with humanitarian aid, kick-ass tools, and extensive knowledge.

Maybe a bit more intense than my own attempts at a pumpkin patch (roll on Spring!), but full of good advice and a great attitude towards life and the planet.

Over at Adventures in Beanland, Anne explores making your own baby food. This is something we did when Isaac was starting solids. When we were in Canada last year, and Isaac was only 6 months old, we were stunned by the amount of sugar that goes into baby food over there. He ate a lot of banana and yoghurt in those three weeks. Beanland has a whole swag of Vego recipes, for those of us who are looking for new and interesting ways to reduce our meat intake.

And in a spot of good news from those nice folk in California, someone is finally doing something about Food Wastage, by spearheading a Food Rescue Program in San Francisco. There's also a bill before the California Senate that would allow purchasers of catered food to mandate that all leftovers be donated to a food charity, rather than discarded as so often happens.

Its good to see that the revolution of attitudes towards food and waste isn't limited to my backyard, and its encouraging to know that I'm not just one isolated voice, but one of a growing number of concerned global citizens determined to do whatever they can to make our planet a better place for our children.

Cooking up New Features

The lovely people at Google have been kind enough to provide me with a custom search bar, which you will see if you take a look to the right of this post and down a bit (or up, as time goes by...). I have set this Foodie Googlie up to only search for things relating to food, cooking, recipes and suchlike. Give it a go! See if its as good as I imagine it might be.

I've also added a few live feed options down the side a bit too, but I really don't know what this does. I suspect it means that when I update Freshly Ground, you will somehow be informed.

It was also recommended that I join the Technorati, though I am likewise ignorant of exactly what this has really meant for me as a blogger and citizen of cyberspace. But as the advice came from a well-trusted source, I, well, trusted it. Please, if you like Freshly Ground, take a moment to fave me (I hope it only takes a moment, anyway). I currently rank about 1.9 billionth in the world, so any advance on that would be encouraging.

And while you're about it, rememer the Free Rice page. Go donate some food to hungry people and expand your brain power at the same time.