Looking Back at 2007

Wow, its been an amazing year! I started this blog about year ago. I don’t know the exact date; even though the first post is dated Jan 1st, I am sure I cheated a bit and fibbed the date. If I remember correctly, I woke up way too hung over on Jan 1st to even go near a computer. But now on I am going to pretend like Jan 1st is my real blog birthday.

When I started a blog last year, I had no idea where I was going with it. I wouldn’t call my life boring, it is far from it, but I couldn’t base a public blog on my everyday life. There are too many girls who write about the drama of their single life, but I believe there is much more drama in a marriage, but I definitely didn’t want to write about that. And work, well there is more than enough drama for a TV serial at my workplace, but the lawsuits sure would’ve been ugly. Anyway, somehow along the way, it occurred to me that I could write about food, the safest subject in the world, a universal topic everyone can relate to.

That is the short version of how this blog became a food blog, it went through a bunch of transformations, starting from the name to the platform used. It started as a personal blog on MSN Spaces, then I moved to blogger, and finally settled on WordPress.

I am very happy with where this blog is right now. There are about hundred recipes and forty restaurant reviews. That means I published a recipe once in three days this year. I was not even cooking once in three days in 2006! I have tried so many new things this year, I even baked my first bread! I could go on and on, but let me just pick some highlights from 2007. These are my personal favorites.

• Best Savory Recipe-  Lamb Chops – Indian Style.
• Best Dessert – Lychee Mango Two Layer Pudding
• Best Cocktail -  Kumquat and Mango Mojito
• Best Restaurant Review – Nishino . One of my proudest moments of 2007 was when this review won a Critic’s Choice Award from Urbanspoon.
• Most Buzzed Post: Random Musings . This one hit a nerve with so many people… It was fun to read the reactions.

I am sending the Lychee Mango Two Layer Pudding to Sandra & Zorra who are hosting the Best of 2007 event. I made this dessert when my parents were visiting, and they loved it. They couldn’t believe their daughter could make something like this, and that made this recipe so special to me.

But none of this would’ve been possible without you all. I would like to thank..

• the food blogging community, for your constant encouragement, and for the notes that you leave for every post, the words of encouragement or the quick hellos that really made this process more interactive and fun. And to the few of you who grew from being a random commenter into more of a friend status, thank you for sharing a bit of your lives with me.
• the anonymous readers who get here looking for a recipe or a restaurant recommendation. Some of you leave a note, some send me a private e-mail, and the majority remains silent. But I thank you all for visiting, because you make my stats go up, and there is nothing that makes me happier than staring at those statscounter graphs everyday.
• my real life friends, who had to sit and wait patiently while I clicked dozens of pictures of their meals in restaurants, before they could take a bite of their own food. Thank you all for those fun night-outs.
• last, but not the least, I would like to thank my sweetheart, my partner-in-crime, who contributed a bunch of recipes on this site. But more than that, thank you for being the guinea pig for all my disastrous cooking experiments, and for waiting patiently while I struggled to get one decent picture out of dinner. Without you in my life, none of this would have been possible.

Now, what is in store for Live to Eat in 2008? I am going to be more regular in posting for sure. I am in the process of redesigning the blog to make it more user friendly.  But other than that, I haven’t made big plans for next year. Life is full of surprises, don’t want to miss out on those by doing a silly thing like planning my life in advance.

This post goes to the Best of 2007 event hosted by Nupur of One Hot Stove.

Wishing all my readers a wonderful New Year! Hope you all had a fabulous 2007!
I will see you all in 2008 with a fresh new look.

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Category: Random Musings