While Men Delay

This mini-entry comes as an apology for the lack of recent updates. I've gone into end-of-semester panic mode, where food exists entirely as a form of unacceptable procrastination and blogging is right out of the question. I do have one recipe's worth of pictures that need posting, but you probably won't get to see it until early May. May will also mean catching up on my schedule, so look forward to a day where I make three different roasts and then throw most of them out because nobody was going to eat them before they went bad anyway.

In the meantime, I don't want to leave you completely empty-handed. So let me talk about blogs!

Playing the Cook is a weird thing, because I am a cooking blog without recipes. There's no particular reason to go back to one entry or another unless you just can't get enough of the old "repeated picture of a covered skillet" gag. That means new posts are the only way to bring in traffic, which is sort of a truism anyway. Still slightly strange for a food blog, I think.

But there are plenty of other good (and related) blogs you can be checking out when I don't update!

• The Blogess: If there is a person whose blogging style I would like to emulate, that person is Jenny. She is also insane and absolutely hilarious. Come for the taxidermied weasels in dresses, stay for the giant metal chickens.
• Smitten Kitchen and The Pioneer Woman: I actually get all of my non-Shakespeare recipes from Punchfork, which is a sort of image-based cooking blog aggregator. It rates recipes by how much exposure the original post is getting and how many Punchfork users are saving the recipe for later. It is also the devil, because it provides pages and pages of delicious food photos. Almost everything I make turns out to be from one of these two sources, and Smitten Kitchen has the additional benefit of wonderful photography.
• A Sasha Party: My good friend Sasha has a blog about throwing and attending parties. It has lots of quick and useful tips for turning chips-and-wine-type-hangouts into memorable soirees. I am also the inspiration for her latest post, 5 Appetizers Even An Idiot Couldn't Mess Up.
• Inn at the Crossroads: Recipes based on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. They just published a book with the blessings of GRRM and HBO, so some things have had to vanish from the site. But it's great to follow another themed cooking project, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if A Feast of Ice and Fire turns out to be the next project after Shakespeare's Kitchen.

The issue of "what kind of blog is this?" also brings up a few other questions. There are times that I cook things that Shakespeare didn't eat, like carnitas or mac-and-cheese. What should I do about that? Are you interested in hearing about my other cooking adventures? And if so, should they be placed in separate entries? Or just mentioned/shown off quickly in other posts? Maybe photo digests of completed dishes with no write-ups? Or full write-ups, but only as part of an official Renaissance entry? I'd really like your opinions on this. I want to know what you would enjoy seeing, because I care about my readers.

By which I mean, page views.

Looking over the statistics for Playing the Cook is always a fun thing, partly because I can puzzle out some of the meaning hidden behind the data. For instance, I have 47 page views from from Georgia, placing it behind the US and above the UK for the source of most views.

This would be pretty weird, except I know that they are in one way or another thanks to my friend Neal at Georgia On My Mind. And then there are the two Russians interested in "sallet of lemons" or my one Indian reader using Opera in Linux who is attempting to discover why his riceballs always fall apart. That's how statistics work, right?

Also, three of my top ten search terms involve the word "penis", and I can only assume that typing it out here will just make things worse.


Penis.