Endless Simmer - A Food Blog

Endless Simmer is one year old today! Can you freaking believe that? It seems like only yesterday we were brainstorming pun names and telling our friends about this hypothetical “blog” thing. It’s been a pretty amazing year, and we really appreciate all our readers coming along for the ride. If you’ll allow us just this one post of self-indulgence, we’d like to take a minute to relive the Best Moments in ES History: Year One. For our long-time fans, enjoy a walk down memory lane, and for newbies, check out some of our all-time fav posts that you may have missed.

10. Gansie gets drunk; invents live blogging Top Chef
During Season 3 of Top Chef, Endless Simmer provided you with next-day recaps, as many other blogs do. But on one Wednesday night this Winter, gansie wandered home from the pub, discovered Top Chef 4 was about to premier, and decided our readers just couldn’t wait until Thursday morning for our must-read insight. Thus a new genre was born: live-blogging pre-recorded episodes of reality television shows. In the beginning, it was just gansie informing a non-existent audience that “Padma’s boots are to die” and “Spike could be hott,” but by the end of the season, we were welcoming huge groups of readers and even saw some celebrity guest lurkers (see moment #3). Stay tuned to ES and who knows what totally unnecessary innovation we’ll come up with next. I think I hear a clamor for Live Blogging Iron Chef America, Live Blogging Sunday Night Dinner Parties, and Live Blogging Repeats of Rachael Ray’s Tasty Travels at 3am

9. JoeHoya’s first comment
On July 6th, 2007, at 12:30 a.m., we were overjoyed to find we had one of our very first comments from a non-friend/family member. It was a classic: “Does it make me just a little bit more of a foodie than you if I know that it’s spelled “bulgur” wheat? And does it make me an ass that I bothered to post that?” In fairness, he concluded the comment “And, now that you hate me, can I also say that this is a great new blog that I’m looking forward to visiting frequently!” He wasn’t kidding. And so an ES star commenter was born. The next year would be filled with friends and family repeatedly asking us: “Who the hell is JoeHoya? And why does he know everything?” Thank you, JoeHoya; no other ES commenter has even come close.

8. “I am going to cut that girl”
Our first brush with stardom came a mere month into our blogging tenure, when the prettier half of our editing team was mysteriously nominated in Fishbowl D.C.’s annual hottest media types contest. Realizing the huge marketing potential of such a moment, we quickly started talking shit about gansie’s competition. In the most dramatic moment of said shit-talking, the frontrunning “hottest media type” got a little angry at our joke that she was clearly cheating, ruminating on her own blog that she was “going to cut that girl who called me a cheater.” Thankfully, no one was cut, and for the record, it turned out she actually was cheating.

7. Padma Lakshmi reads ES every day
OK fine, that might be an exaggeration. Just a little. But it’s kinda-sorta-possibly true. A few months back, a good friend of our contributor britannia ended up interning for a Manhattan publicist that does work for ES Icon Padma Lakshmi. When the publicist asked him to print out blog posts about Padma for the star to read, he of course mentioned that he knew the folks writing Endless Simmer. “Oh yeah, we’ve read them before,” replied Padma’s PR flack. So for all of you who comment not-so-nice things about this extremely talented chef, curb it, OK, because Padma is always watching.

PS - Hi Padma!

6. 80 proof gets a new camera
We were fairly proud of our first five months of blog posts, but 80p def took us to a new, semi-profess level when he started snapping pics with his new Christmas-bestowed camera. Sure we were snarky before, but now we’re artsy too. A blogosphere-world double whammy.

5. America’s best real food blog
Oh, New York Times. Your eternal uppityness is a godsend for hungry young bloggers. Our latest post making fun of the King of the MSM was so popular that it landed us a profile in USA Today, perhaps the only paper more MSM-y than the Times. How meta.

4. Oh yeah, cooking
Hey, we’re not just link-whores and Padma-stalkers around here. We actually like to post some recipes from time to time. Choosing your favorite recipe is like choosing your favorite child (easy). Personally, I’m most proud of the hot dog sushi Pinch of Minch and I invented, but for most likely to inspire a cookbook, I have to nominate gansie’s new classic Eggplant and Chickpea Lasagna.

3. Spike shows up to live blog
Even though the three of us were fully enamored with our live-blog dorkiness, we still weren’t sure that it was really catching on yet. That is until JoeHoya bumped into this year’s fifth place contestant Spike, while he was hard at work on his new D.C. restaurant, Good Stuff. Being the star ES commenter that he is, JH of course mentioned our live-blogging, and during the season finale, Mr. Spike showed up online to share his thoughts. For those of you unbelievers, we have it on good authority that this was in fact Spike, live and in the (virtual) flesh, commenting on ES.

2. “I was at my own dinner party with my own family”
The D.C. Hottest Media Types took it to a whole ‘nother level in October when gansie attended a hoity-toity dinner event and ran into one of her hottie competitors, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist Dana Priest. Clearly, gansie downed another glass of wine and worked up the nerve to talk to Dana about the contest, a somewhat lengthy chat that she subsequently blogged about. Gansie’s blog post worked up quite a bit of media-world buzz and one of Ms. Priest’s co-workers at the Post ended up sending it to her. Um…funny thing…turns out Priest showed up on Endless Simmer to inform us that she wasn’t even at the event in question and had never met gansie. Oops! And so our first retraction occurred. Dana Priest went on to win a second Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for her work uncovering the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed. Gansie went on to correctly identify such famous-for-DC people as Andrew Sullivan.

1. We discover top ten lists
Back in March, we didn’t know quite how ES should cover the amazing-ness that is March Madness, so we decided to cover drunk college food in a Top Ten format, and holy crap you interwebs people like that. The post, our most successful piece yet, shot its way all over the Internet, from Sports Illustrated to Serious Eats and even a video discussion over at Mr. Irrelevant. Goodbye paragraphs, hello bullet points.

Seriously, everyone - thanks for reading! Here’s to 100 more years, or at least until something cooler than blogging come along.

Photo: The MunkyHouse