Blog in review

Blogging is a strange thing, I have been blogging now for about 5 months now and I still can't say that I totally get it or understand my draw to it. You can take two approaches to blogging; 1. writing for yourself or 2. writing for an audience. When you write for yourself, it is like journal and can be very therapeutic and easy to share your feelings, but it is also sort of creepy because it is out there for the world to read. It is like leaving the tiny key to your diary out at a slumber party, everyone gets access. Writing for an audience is a full time job. Oh and you have to collect an audience, count that as another full time job in PR and Marketing. I still am not sure what approach I am taking with my blog, maybe a mix of both. I am enjoying the writing, though I feel my writing skills are not up to par with other bloggers. Reading other well written blogs has been fun and gives me new recipes and ideas. Secretly I sort of do want blog fame, but why? And who will read it? There are a million stay-at-home-mom blogs. Who knows why I am doing it, I like it and I guess that is enough, so I am going to keep going and will add a few new features to the blog. May was a light month on the blog as we did some traveling and the excitement of summer's arrival took up much of my time. I am back in the game, there will be travel and many fun summer adventures, but I will try make time for the blog.

Contesting Update
The contesting is not going so well, but I am not giving up!! As I said, May was a slow month for me, I was cooking, but not much for contests. Currently there are not many contests running that I feel passionate about. I feel like when I try new recipes from cook books I am really just training and becoming a better cook which all helps me in my progress to contest success. I will win a contest someday!

New feature - CSA Community Supported Agriculture
My CSA starts tomorrow! I am very excited and slightly intimidated. It is crazy how nervous I am about the responsibility of using all this fresh produce. The CSA is my first step at being a responsible consumer and feeding my family safely grown foods. I really want to be one of those people, but change is hard. I feel very torn by the whole "organic & local" movement. I can't bring myself to buy organic milk for $6 a gallon when the regular milk is only $2.50. Why!?! Shouldn't my family's health be more important than saving a few bucks? The CSA will be a great introduction to the "healthy life" for us all and maybe it will help me begin to make that change. I will do a weekly blog on the CSA box: what's in it and what I make out of it. I would also like to invite my fellow CSA members to contribute their recipes and CSA success. I'll post pictures from our first box tomorrow!

New feature - Cooking For Fun
I love writing about my contest dishes, but we make great meals everyday. I have been holding myself to this silly strict rule that the blog is only about contesting. No more! I will begin blogging about good meals we cook just for fun.

So to wrap it up, I like my blog and am going to expand it slightly so I have more things to write about. Who knows if I will every achieve "blog fame". As long as I am having fun blogging and if I don't put too much stress on myself over it, we'll keep it going. Let's see what we can cook up this summer!