Kiwi Food Blogs and How to Keep Up!

I like to think that you guys enjoy what I write, and I love hearing your comments and thoughts, but I also love checking out other food blogs, and though I used to mainly follow overseas blogs there are so many great Kiwi food blogs now I wanted to share some of them with you.

While writing this I counted up the Kiwi food blogs I know of and got to an astounding 75! Of course, lots of these are updated infrequently, which suits me just fine as I'd never keep up otherwise, but long gone are the days when there were only a handful.

I don't want to overwhelm you so I'll just mention a few. If I've missed your favourites please share them in the comments - and I'll share some more with you in a few weeks, when you've had time to digest these! ;-)

Lovely Wee Days is written by three lovely ladies spread across the country, with lots of yummy recipes. I love the weekly "A few of our favourite things" post, in which each of the authors write something she's enjoying that week - I have discovered a few new favourites of my own from this feature!

Hungry and Frozen is wonderfully friendly and conversational, with much mention of music, Laura's other love, but certainly no skirting around the glory of good food. Emphasis on having fun with food and making sure you don't skimp on the good stuff (butter! And other delicious things).

Sasa of Sasasunakku features lots of Japanese inspired foods, among other things, and I always find her recipes completely alluring and much more exciting than the things I make. She is also on a mission to fight hangrrr (that's the anger that comes with hunger) - a very valid cause!

The delightful Nessie shows us that Baking = Love, where she shares glorious baking from the heart - and has recently introduced a feature I'm a bit of a closet fan of - Trash Tuesdays. This is where she lets her readers in on her sneaky junk food habits. I certainly have plenty of those and it's reassuring to see a fellow foodie publicly confessing she does too!

Delaney, who the lively lass making a name for us food bloggers on Good Morning once a fortnight, pens Heartbreak Pie, which is quirky and honest and always interesting.

Toast features lots of drool-worthy recipes and funky photos. Mairi not only provides gorgeous recipes (remember this ratatouille goats cheese crumble? Her fault!) but also takes very arty photos, and lately has been publishing versions of the same photo taken with camera and iPhone - it's really interesting to see the difference, and you'd be suprised how often the iPhone one comes out better.

Sugar & Spice is a relative newcomer, written by fellow Wellingtonian Shirleen. I am often impressed by the luxury factor in her home-cooked meals - last week she wrote up this lovely roast quail recipe; something I certainly wouldn't have thought of making for dinner!

If you're a keen blog reader (like me) you probably have your own way of managing your reading, but I thought while I'm on the topic I might highlight a few of the ways you can keep up with your favourites.

You can bookmark the sites, and visit them when you are looking for some reading - you won't get told when a site has been recently updated but you at least will have control over how much of your day gets sucked into drooling over food. ;-)

The main way I follow blogs is via Google Reader - you can subscribe to any site you like to read using this, and whenever the site is updated the new post will show up in your feed. There are other sites that do this but I find Google Reader easy since I use Gmail for email so already have a Google account and am always signed in. To subscribe, look for the subscribe button on the site you're on, or check the bookmark menu on your browser.

Often us bloggerfolk will post links to our latest offerings on Facebook or Twitter - I use both, and enjoy the conversation that can result following the update. I made a pricing update on the peanut butter post the other day was a result of a discussion on my Facebook wall after I linked to the post, and I've many times been inspired by tempting tweets from other foodies.

You can also get blog posts delivered to your email - if you glance at the right hand column you should see a wee box you can pop your email address in. Once a day (if I update) you'll get an email with the latest post in it.

How do you keep up to date with your reading, and what other blogs do you like? I'm hoping since you're here you like mine a bit - what else do you read?