"blogger" news and stories

• One blogger is eating her way through the hundreds of menu items at the Hollywood's Jitlada. Hey, it's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it.
• What's the best focaccia topping? (Trick question!)
• Ready for Valentine's Day? Los Angeles restaurateurs are.
• French toast: It's not just for breakfast anymore.

Have you met the breakfast blogger? Or, more accurately, the breakfast bloggers? They are a trio of bloggers who report primarily on what they consider to be the best meal of the day, both on foods that they have cooked and on some of the restaurants they've eaten at. While breakfast foods both sweet and savory are appealing, there is nothing like getting the day started with a sugar rush. This is a piece of Danish french toast, where a Danish pastry was used instead of plain bread as the base, demonstrating that almost any bread item can be "frenched." Step by step directions are here.

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Sarah had a point when she said that conference food is pretty much always fattening. I am currently at the BlogHer conference, along with a few other people from Weblogs, Inc., and even though the company is wonderful, I can say less for the food. When a hotel prepares fried food for a large group, it is inevitably greasy and heavy, so it was unfortunate that the meals centered on that. Lunch on the first day included fried chicken and dinner was a buffet of fried foods, like egg rolls and dumplings, as well as kebabs slathered in various sauces. There was no salad option at dinner, although there was a cheese plate. Any dinner dissatisfaction was quelled by the open bar, though I did hear some slightly dissatisfied murmuring about the fact that Pepsi, and not Coke, was the hotel's soda of choice. Many women opted for calcium-fortified water instead.

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Earlier this month, a Spain-based blogger named Diana took on the project of blogging 30 days on a raw food diet. "From tomorrow I will begin a 30 day Raw Food experiment. I have researched the subject till the cows come home- tried and failed numerous times, but this time will be different!!" she says in her first post. By day five she'd already had a few beers, which apparently falls outside of the raw food program. Diana's stated goal for the project is weight loss, and she notes her starting and current weight at the beginning of each post. So far it looks to be mostly veggies, smoothies and sprouted grains. I'm curious to see how creative she gets with her meals and how conscious she'll be about nutrition. Hopefully the tone will keep to the upbeat and informative side and not drift too much into obsessing about weight loss.

Melting moment is a name that is applied to many different, yet similar, types of cookies. Some are crunchy, while others tend toward a softer feel. The most common ingredient is cornstarch/cornflour, but they occasionally contain finely ground nuts (this makes them Mexican Wedding Cookies, but I've still seen them called melting moments). The one thing that they all have in common is the property that gives them their name: they are so tender that they melt into your mouth. JenJen, at Milk and Cookies, posted these Melting Moments, which she made with high quality butter and cornflour. They're lightly sweetened, dusted with powdered sugar and, of course, melt into your mouth. I love the jar that she presented them in, too. Not only is it a nice visual touch, but it looks like the cookies are ready to ship out to anyone who wants to taste them, unless you want to try making your own.

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