A food blogger without access to recipes is like a kite without its string. Hence, nestled among foods and drinks samples on a long table inside The Gift Suite at the International Food Blogger Conference in Portland, Oregon were piles of books, flyers and postcards with thousands of recipes of all kinds.

Coming all the way from Indonesia we could not carry all the recipes back home but noted some information worth keeping especially those recipes for a cause

Made with Love- The Meals on Wheels Family Cookbook.

We found a Cookbook Preview with 13 recipes in a 30 pages booklet. The book, coming out in October 2012  includes recipes from the tables of well-known actors, chefs, writers and other celebrities along with personal stories about their family favorite meals.

Mironoff Piroshki, for example, is a cabage pies recipe from Helen Mirren an academy award winning actress, with reminiscence about tales of life told by her Russian grandfather

Meals on Wheels Association of America provide more than one million meals a day for seniors across America. Edited by Enid Borden, the organization's President and CEO, Made with Love features recipes from Judy Dench, Linda Evans, Martha Stewart, Mario Batali, Maya Angeloe plus more than 100 other celebrities.

Allrecipes.com

Allrecipes.com boasts 750 million annual visits from family-focused women who connect and inspire one another through photos, reviews, videos and blog posts.

We were lucky to have sat next to Stephanie Robinett, All recipes.com’s Director of Communications, during the IFBC dinner. Stephanie explained that the web is available in many countries and different languages. It is apparently a global, multiplatform brand providing insights into the lives of women everywhere based on activity from 17 websites, 17 mobile sites, 9 mobile apps and 14 eBooks serving 22 countries in 11 languages.

Surprisingly when we searched allrecipes.com in its Southeast Asia page we found almost 50 recipes to make Indonesian foods such as Pisang Goreng (Indonesian Banana Fritters, Rujak (Indonesian Fruit Salad), Indonesian Beef Rendang, Indonesian Fried Tofu, and Karedok, a Sundanese Salad. The fact is allrecipes.com have inclusive recipes, where people do not feel left out because they can find recipes from the regions where they live.

Allrecipes.com listed its top 15 recipes of all time on a flyer. Down at number 15 is Alfredo Sauce with 5.5 million page views and the number 1 recipe is the World’s Best Lasagna with 14 million page views.

Recipe Postcards

While there were rows of books and magazines containing recipes available at the event in Portland, finding postcards that advertise brands and recipes at the same time was a unique experience for us.

Hinode Rice has a double- sided glossy index card with pictures of its product line on one side and a recipe for Mediterranean Rice Bake on the other side. The Erewhon Whole Grain Cereal  had a card with $1.00 off manufacturer’s coupon for Buckwheat and Hemp Cereal at Whole Foods. Cited from the book Gluten Free Girl and the Chef by Dan & Shauna Ahern was a recipe of Apple Buckwheat Crisp. 

StoneBuhr Flour  exhibited a postcard with a picture of an old barn and a recipe of All-Butter Pie Pastry on the other side cited from Rustic Fruit Desserts by Cory Schreiber and Julie Richardson. Another card is Stone Buhr’s Find the Farmer Campaign  where consumers can find out about the family farms that grew the grain milled to create the bags of flours that they bought through its website.

Recipe Writing and Development

With all the recipes available for the taking, food bloggers may want to develop and write their own recipes.  Writing and developing original recipes is an inventive process; therefore the IFBC 2012 organized a workshop session with Kelly Senyei  to teach bloggers how to come up with a totally unique culinary creation.

In the workshop that we attended, Kelly the author of Food Blogging for Dummies,  shared the fundamentals of effective recipe creation, which includes every element from mastering the art of headnotes and striving for stylistic consistency, to embracing the importance of cross testing while deciphering the six essential components of every recipe. These six elements, Senyei described, are the title, headnote, serving size, timing, ingredient list and method of preparation.

Make it Personal

The display of human interests in food production and consumption makes for thought provoking recipes. As families would like to know where their food come from and how to cook for day to day meals as well as for family events, recipes for a cause will stand out among thousands to try.

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 Photos by Dian Anggraini.