A New Food Venture: Food Bloggers of Canada

I’ve been a bit quiet lately with recipe and photography posts.

But, I have a good excuse! Really, I do…

Four months ago, over dinner with friends, an idea got tossed out and started to percolate.  Over the next few weeks it began to take shape and before we knew it, it started to take on a life of its own.

The friends were Mardi and Ethan and the idea was to give Canadian food bloggers a place to network and socialize and have access to Canadian blogging resources.  And maybe, just maybe, we’d be able to grow it to a point where we could host our own Canadian food blogging conference.

So we set to work and it’s been a whirl wind to get this up and running in four months but, today, we did it.  We launched Food Bloggers of Canada.

We’ve had a tremendous amount of help with guest posts from such amazing Canadian bloggers like Liz from Guilty Kitchen, Dan from Dan’s Goodside and Jan from Family Bites.  With more great food blogging talent in the wings for the weeks ahead, we’re feeling pretty confident that we’re going to succeed with our goal of bringing Canadian food bloggers some great original content and blogging resources.  With them and the terrific group of volunteers like Michelle from Food, Football and a Baby, Janice from Kitchen Heals Soul and Joy from The Herbed Kitchen,  who’ve helped us pull together listings of food events across this (very) big country and all the people who helped us test the site, it’s definitely been a collective effort!

I also want to thank my friend, colleague and sometime collaborator, Dave Zille from Dazil Internet, for donating hosting space to the site and for giving me invaluable WordPress development advice during the entire project.  This was my first time designing and developing a membership and forum site in WordPress and I sure learned a lot!

And I just want to say that in the last few months, Ethan and Mardi went from being casual blogging acquaintances who I knew through the internet, to becoming really good real life friends.  I love you guys!

We’re very excited and I hope you’ll all take the time to check it out and, if you’re Canadian, we hope you’ll become a member!  We have a great forum where you can participate in discussions and plan local meetups.

And about that food conference… well… we’re working on it! 😉

And The Winner Is!

The winner of the Scott Kelby, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 book is Sylvie from Gourmande in the Kitchen, who writes a fantastic food photography blog.

Random.org generated #8 and after removing Mardi from the comments as asked (she already owned the book), Sylvie was our winner.  Congrats, I’ll be in touch shortly to get your details!