Food &

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Guest post from Ross Featherstone, who as will become clear, attended our BlogNorth4 event in April. We are chuffed to have played a small, but bossy, part of this story!

At approximately 6.47pm on January 1st 2013 I decided – this year will be the year. It’s something many of us say during the turkey-bloated build up to New Years Eve and the booze induced dehydrated days after. The list of to-dos from last January are dusted off and filtered to find those that are still relevant, yet disappointingly remain to be addressed. For me it wasn’t to lose weight, drink less, or join a gym. This year was going to be the year I finally started and, more importantly, finished setting up a food blog, and with a helpful nudge from Blog North #4 I’ve finally done it.

I’m a keen home cook, an obsessive collector of cookery books and one of those annoying people who take pictures of their meals before picking up a fork. I design and build websites for a living, so you would think that setting up a blog would be a pretty straightforward process for me. It seems not. I’ve attempted to create a food blog on numerous occasions over the last several years, but have never got as far as writing a post. I’ve always been hung up on the design, spending endless hours deliberating over layouts and functionality, colour schemes and styles. Of course, what I should have been focusing on was the content, but I just didn’t realise it.

As the year progressed I started to fall into the same habits, spending more time concentrating on the aesthetics than the actual content and by late March, despite having some talented friends on board who shared an interest in the project, I still hadn’t set up the site. Then I heard that the studios where I work (the lovely Duke Studios) would be the venue for the latest Blog North event. The topic of this 1 day gathering was food, with workshops “designed to support you in your blogging adventures”. I immediately signed up – this was the nudge I needed to get my act together.

The thought of walking into a room full of seasoned food bloggers with little to show for myself than a history of false starts was daunting. It was like starting at a new school. But as we introduced ourselves at the beginning of the first workshop, ‘No such thing as a free lunch’ by the no-nonsense writer Emma Sturgess, I was relieved to hear that I wasn’t the only new starter – there was a healthy mix of established and beginner bloggers and a genuine eagerness by all to learn from the workshop leaders and each other. The encouragement I received from everyone I met was really valuable. Those who’d already set up food blogs clearly loved doing it, and found reward (not monetary, but the all important personal satisfaction) in doing so. This cemented everything for me and I realised I was going to see this thing through.

The skills and tips I picked up from the workshops provided me with a good grounding in how to approach producing content for the blog. However, it was something that occurred outside of the workshops that gave me that final boost. Shortly after eating a fantastic array of North African and Middle Eastern food which Cafe Moor had supplied for lunch, Emma Bearman invited Cafe Moor’s founder, Kada, to talk to us about the story behind his business. He spoke with such pride and sincerity about the cuisine, the importance of its heritage and how he’d selected the dishes we’d just eaten, that it confirmed the route I wanted the blog to take. It had to be about food and the people behind it.

We all share recipes, but what interests me (and I hope others) are the stories behind those recipes – why is a recipe important to someone? What food do people cook to remind them of other people or places? If someone has taken months or years to grow a vegetable, or rear an animal to eat, what recipe do they choose to celebrate that ingredient and why? Fuelled by this (and the glorious chicken parcels Kada had prepared) I’d finally arrived at the realisation, after years of false-starts, that content was the key.

Since Blog North #4, I’ve finally got Food&_ up and running and there’s a growing list of foodies, writers, photographers and illustrators across the globe (thanks internet) all set to work together on this project, sharing skills and stories with each other in the process.

So, this year has been the year and it’s reassuring to know that I, and a few others, will be waking up on the 1st January dusting off one less to-do.