Happy birthday megnut

Today is the eighth birthday of Megnut. I made the very first post back in 1999, which is hard to believe as that was ages and ages ago. Since that time this site has changed dramatically, and as you know, has spent the last year in its newest incarnation as a food site. I’ve really enjoyed writing about food and I’ve learned a ton. Alas that experience has also led me a bit astray. I got involved in helping Ed Levine get Serious Eats off the ground over the last eight months, and my postings here really suffered because of that. Now that Serious Eats is off and running, I’m turning my attention back to this site, and am looking forward to another year (or more!) of food postings and discussions. But before we take off into the future, for fun here’s a look back at the year that was!

In April 2006 (ok, cheating a little bit, but in April I really started post about food in earnest) I looked at Further information about foie gras production from Jeffrey Steingarten’s article for Men’s Vogue.

In May I reflected on Four years since the French Laundry. Also I looked at War food and Memorial Day.

June saw the arrival of guest blogger Michael Ruhlman and a nice change from usual mumblings. All his posts can be found here.

In July I traveled a lot, so Ruhlman continued to pick up the slack. But I had time to have Fun with trout, when I tried to prepare Thomas Keller’s truite a la grenobloise at home and boned my first trout. I have yet to try again, but was just talking about this experience today with folks. I must get some more trout.

August 3 should be a holy day around our house, as that’s the day when I discovered I was Crazy for salt. After saving some fleur de sel in my pantry for more than a year after I purchased it in Paris, I opened it and my life was forever changed. There has been no going back. I am crazy for salt.

In September my husband and I went to Austria for vacation and we experienced garlic soup for the first time. I set about recreating it at home and wrote it up with A creamy taste of Innsbruck. There was also a good discussion about Getting too full during a great meal.

October will be remembered as the month I made chicken wings with Daniel Boulud (resulting in this Serious Eats Basics: Braising video) and he whacked a wing so hard that blood splattered all over my sweater. Also I Did the Daisy May Pig Gig, which entailed eating suckling pig with a batch of friends. Highly recommended.

November may go down in history as one of my favorite months of Megnut ever. I discovered the best pie crust ever and made three pies for my family. I almost lost my mind doing an extensive Thanksgiving round-up I called the “Thanksgiving Spectacular of 2006” (best viewed by reading the November 2006 monthly archive). Though that was fun, I’m not sure I’ll do it again this year. And most importantly, I received a free lobe of foie gras and proceeded to kick the Amateur Gourmet’s ass in Battle Foie Gras.

December saw me do some good cooking, with my büche de Noël and Christmas dinner with goose. I also discovered Sticky Toffee Pudding from Häagen-Dazs and ate a ton of it. It seems to be gone from my store now. 🙁

January 2007 got off with a whimper rather than a bang, and the most interesting thing I seemed to have posted about was How natural is natural food?

In February I alerted readers to the new trend of chocolate cereal. This is when you can see the effect of spending so much time in Serious Eats. The site really started to go down hill.

March saw an annoucement from Wolfgang Puck stating he’d “use products only from animals raised under strict humane standards” and I wondered about Wolfgang Puck’s humane decision. I also foolishly announced a Best chocolate chip cookie search and promised to make all the recipes readers submitted. I am still working on this. Really! Also I gave up on food due to the confusion of the current nutritional dictates.

And just this past April saw me posting about Poor man’s sous vide and I got all crazed about plastic melting into sous vided food. I have still not gotten to the bottom of this issue, but that probably doesn’t surprise you.

So what does that portend for the rest of the year? Hopefully more of the same: good links, funny weird food stuff, great reader interactions, and some in-depth informative writing about issues that are really important to me, like sustainable and humane food practices. I know for sure that I’ll continue to enjoy being a food enthusiast, and sharing that enthusiasm with you. Thanks for reading, whether it’s been for eight years, or just a few days.