Second Helpings 2008
Dec 31st, 2008 by admin
Every month on World Foodie Guide, there’s a short round-up of news and particularly interesting reviews or recipes in Second Helpings. Here is the end of year version for 2008!
I went to Italy twice, as well as on a long trip to Hong Kong, Macau and China. All these wonderful traveleating trips are well documented with food photos under Restaurant Reviews and have inspired recipes such as Roast Pumpkin, Butter & Sage Spaghetti. Attending Japanese and Indian cookery workshops at Books for Cooks has also broadened my repertoire of simple, home-cooked dishes, and I plan to go to more workshops next year. Making macarons at L’atelier des Chefs with fourteen food bloggers was certainly my cookery highlight of 2008!
The quality of food photos improved somewhat during the latter half of 2008 with the purchase of my Sony Cybershot W300 point and shoot. Now I can’t imagine going anywhere without it. It’s small enough to take into restaurants and I’ve had no problems using it discreetly with the flash off. Photos have been published on SanPellegrino.com, Square Meal, Fodors and Whatsonwhen, while restaurant reviews have featured on review site London Eating and Chinese community website DimSum.
Fellow food bloggers passed on various awards onto me, for which I am most grateful. It’s been fascinating meeting people from all around the world who share such a passion for food, particularly on Twitter (follow me here).
World Foodie Guide moved from WordPress.com to its own hosted server and domain name. It looks much the same, but is hopefully easier for readers to navigate and find information. Every post is archived in the Pages at the top, but do let me know if there is something that you can’t find, and I’ll point you in the right direction.
And my plans for 2009? Much the same as last year – travel more in order to learn about foods and cuisines around the world; cook more in order to understand how ingredients work with each other (and be less reliant on the vegetarian husband for meals!), and eat high quality food at reasonable prices, but slightly less of it. I’d also like to meet more fellow food bloggers in person, and will be starting with a food quiz in late January…
As always, I welcome all comments and suggestions and try to reply to everyone individually.
Thank you for reading World Foodie Guide and Happy New Year!
Hi Helen!
I like a lot your goals for this year 2009 especially for food & traveling. I couldn’t visit physically so far all the countries mentioned but I taste often their cuisines
Hope you have a Happy & Healthy New Year 2009 !!
Cheers!
Gera .:. sweetsfoods
Gera – happy new year & all the best for 2009! Look forward to visiting your blog & many others this year. I’ve been too busy recently, but will spend more time learning from reading other people’s opinions and advice…See you on Twitter!
Helen Yuet Ling