If you read Creative Loafing's website, or peruse our Daily Loaf mega-blog, you might have virtually met some of the exciting people we've recently brought on board. From home cooks to restaurant insiders, we've assembled a wide array of cool food and drink folk to give you the skinny on our local and national food scene.
If you're a traditionalist who likes the smear of newsprint on your hands, consider this an introduction to what you're missing by sticking to your ways. Maybe a few titillating teases will get you to log on and read up on the exciting world of CL's expanded food and drink coverage. Get in on the ground floor now, since we'll debut a brand-new food site in the coming weeks, as well as introduce another group of savory savants to sate your hunger for the best cooking, wine, beer, spirits and restaurant information.
Leslie Green — The Hungry Housewife
Leslie is a local girl who grew up in Florida watching her mother peruse cookbooks and experiment with recipes. "I thought she was a total dork," she says. "Now I'm her."
A few years ago, she began a passionate affair with baking that inevitably led to taking pictures of her creations, although she says, "I'm not sure why I started doing that." Earlier this year, she started her Hungry Housewife blog to justify her time, effort and photo-culinary fetish. "It was a good excuse to cook," she explains.
Leslie quickly ensconced herself in the incestuous recipe blogosphere, churning out beautiful photography and humorous descriptions of the down-to-earth cooking she produces for her husband and kids, all the while garnering a fan base of amateur cooks.
In her short stint as a CL contributor, she's produced our most widely read food piece of December — a recipe for homemade Peppermint Bark à la Williams-Sonoma. In the spirit of the season, she's also given step-by-step instructions on how to spend an inordinate amount of time decorating simple sugar cookies to impress your family. This week, she cuts the effort with cute marshmallow snowmen you can throw together in minutes.
Dave is a full-time graduate student at USF, but also takes time out to write about the local food scene (as well as books, movies, sustainability and politics) at his Re/Creating Tampa blog. (Check out his annual Best of Tampa awards, voted on by his readers, for a Hillsborough-centric counter to our annual Best Of issue.)
Dave's already informed us of the new CineBistro opening in Hyde Park, the problems of genetically modified seeds and a round-up of holiday cupcake glamour shots.
Katie graduated from the culinary arts program at the Art Institute of Tampa last year and sagely skipped the restaurant biz to become a food stylist at the Bay area's own Home Shopping Network. She's wrangled dishes from Wolfgang Puck and Tyler Florence to make them pretty for the camera, but she's also a fine cook in her own right, having won the Art Institute's student Iron Chef competition her final year.
Recently, she's written about judging that same competition this year, as well as novel ways to use your rice cooker for more than just sushi filling.
Dan works for OSI Restaurant Partners, but also blogs on the side about his fascination with getting the best out of restaurants. (You can read Classy Eater — his manifesto on getting value out of chain restaurants — on his blog at greeneggsmarketing.com.)
So far, Dan has waxed poetic about 7-11's candy cane hot chocolate and Dairy Queen's peppermint chip Blizzard.
Rishi moved to Florida from his native Trinidad in 1995 and immediately immersed himself in the wide world of ethnic cuisine represented in the area, while maintaining links with his West Indian background. Look to him for explorations of Tampa's vibrant culinary underbelly, like his recent tour of Oceanic Trading Supermarket.
You like beer? Anyone who's read her occasional brew reviews in these pages knows that Bethany gets the sudsy stuff. She'll be giving you her take on interesting beers, Tampa's thriving local beer scene and other hop- and barley-related news. Check out her rundown of Otter Creek's Jamaican Stout this week.
He/she is an anonymous restaurant worker, like thousands of other nameless folk who bring you food and drink across the Bay area. Every single one of those people has stories to tell that would likely have you cringing in embarrassment or rolling on the floor. Our guy/gal is just willing to tell the tales.
But wait, there's more. Wine experts, scotch guys, veggie and fruit gardening experts, farmers, amateur restaurant reviewers and culinary handymen are in the pipeline, with more people arriving on CL's website every week. You'll also find additional coverage from me and wine-maven Taylor Eason (check out her budget conscious $100 case of wine series), the names you've come to cherish, revile and/or respect in the pages of CL.
Haven't you heard? Print's dead. So smell the ink, snap the paper, fulfill your traditional bent. But after that, log on to CL's website for a whole lot more tasty information than can be crammed into a few pages of print.
