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"   The evolution of the food blog has been one of the major cultural happenings in the past decade. Uploading thoughts on cooking and eating has transformed from a niche hobby to a bona fide industry. Careers are regularly forged from these sites, which can lead to professional gigs and book or movie deals, raising the stakes considerably. There are now the gossip bloggers, the traveling eaters, the snap-my-every-mealers, the restaurant reviewers, and the home cooks who include, but are not limited to, moms, small-kitchen copers, and strangers-in-a-strange-land homemakers. With the kitchen, so to speak, growing increasingly crowded, we thought it high time to honor our favorite visionaries. The rigor and devotion of these six women fuel our fantasies of a well-fed life and endlessly inspire us to concoct our own creative paths.  Eddie Gehman Kohan   obamafoodorama.com Her Twist:  Dogged reporting on the 44th presidency and all things food.  Her Pull:  &amp;quot;Asking how many page views is like asking how big your johnson is. And in 2011, it&amp;#039;s an outdated question. It&amp;#039;s more who&amp;#039;s paying attention. I&amp;#039;m read around the world. Whenever the president visits a new country, those people get on board. Ethiopia started reading it when Marcus Samuelsson cooked for the president. Ethiopia! After I put the Obama Super Bowl menu up, it got 10,000 hits within minutes. I&amp;#039;m the only lone-wolf blogger who has regular press access to the White House. Tomorrow I&amp;#039;ve been invited to a roundtable with the first lady, just me and 10 print reporters.&amp;quot;  Her Trajectory:  Kohan was brought up in Southern California by a family with little money (her father wrote the cultish Haphazard Gourmet cookbook). She put herself through Penn, where she majored in public and urban policy, with full-time jobs in the food industry. She went on to do an MFA at the University of Virginia on a Henry Hoyns poetry fellowship. She worked as a journalist, then opted out for about six years to raise her two children (&amp;quot;head of the PTA, the whole thing!&amp;quot;). She and two of her sisters helped found a blog called Haphazard Gourmet Girls. On it, she covered food during the elections, and from there spun it into Obamafoodorama. It&amp;#039;s a full-time job for her, with a managing editor and three interns. Scoop!  I consider this a historic document\u2014the Library of Congress is caching the site. I don&amp;#039;t try to break news. But I do. I was at a speech Sam Kass was giving in Dallas and I noticed they introduced him with a new senior White House title. I posted and the next day &amp;quot;Health Food Czar&amp;quot; was on the front of the Drudge Report.  The Surprise:  Kohan is a Republican. &amp;quot;People assume I&amp;#039;m a Democrat because I cover food policy and this administration. But food is the ultimate bipartisan issue&amp;quot; What&amp;#039;s Next:  A site redesign and two books: a memoir about a tattooed hipster going to Washington and a more serious food policy overview.     Molly Wizenberg   orangette.blogspot.com Her Twist:  Launched in 2004, Orangette was one of the first sites to couple tightly crafted musings with recipes and beautiful photography. There have been imitators, but Wizenberg continues at peak form, presenting a how-to manual for self-determined days\u2014without being born rich. Her Trajectory:  Wizenberg&amp;#039;s father died suddenly of cancer just as she&amp;#039;d begun a PhD program in cultural anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle. &amp;quot;I reflected a lot on the fact that he&amp;#039;d been a doctor for 50 years and loved his work the whole time,&amp;quot; she says. She went to Paris to research her graduate topic, the social security system, but realized most of her notes were on patisseries. She flew home and started her blog the next day. This lead her to a best-seller, A Homemade Life. Fan Highlight:  Her husband-to-be found her through the blog. What&amp;#039;s Next:  On a shoestring budget, they opened the very successful Delancey pizzeria in Seattle. Wizenberg is working on a book about the experience. On Blog as Commitment:  &amp;quot;My readers are responsible for my success. I feel \u00ADaccountable to them the same way one would be to investors. Sometimes that&amp;#039;s \u00ADuncomfortable, \u00ADsometimes it&amp;#039;s \u00ADreassuring. But that&amp;#039;s why I started it. I wanted accountability.&amp;quot;     Krista Garcia   www.goodiesfirst.com Her Twist:  Keeping it real. Garcia represents the old, more innocent blog days. She&amp;#039;s been a Web presence since 1998 and has consistently maintained her unpretentious, sardonic voice. She writes about chain restaurants, inexpensive neighborhood food, and eating trips. She&amp;#039;ll take time to rant about people misspelling palate or let her readers know that China has a food pagoda instead of a food pyramid. Her voice represents the best in the Gen-X slacker. Her Trajectory:  Garcia grew up in Gresham, Oregon, eating taco salads or eggs and bacon every night. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think I saw a fresh vegetable until I was an adult,&amp;quot; she says. In art school in Portland during the Riot Grrrl early 1990s, she started a zine called The Scaredy-Cat Stalker, a fond but tongue-in-cheek appreciation of the E.T. child star Henry Thomas and all he stood for. &amp;quot;He was an underdog as an adult. I was rooting for him.&amp;quot; She moved to New York and transitioned to online writing with a food focus. &amp;quot;Five months after I moved, I ran into Thomas. It was strange. He knew who I was. We went out for drinks.&amp;quot; Watching the Scene Change:  &amp;quot;No one used to have pictures. Julie/Julia had no pictures! Now it&amp;#039;s what everyone wants. I do too. But I might start only posting words again. Like the aging rock star who wants people to listen to their new album, but the crowds only want the greatest hits.  Book Deal Dreams?  No! I&amp;#039;ve thought about that\u2014should I get an angle, write about cooking all Thomas Keller&amp;#039;s dishes, or only recipes with peanut butter?\u2014but I just don&amp;#039;t have that kind of hard sell.      Heidi Swanson   101cookbooks.com Her Twist:  Making whole food sexy and a balanced, nurturing, and nurtured existence look feasible.  Her Trajectory:  While studying art at the University of California, San Diego, Swanson discovered the computer visualization lab, where she learned early Web design. During the 1990s dot-com frenzy, she started ChickClick, a progressive site for teen girls. &amp;quot;When my parent company went public, I got a little bit of money. I could have put a down payment on a house, but I realized I&amp;#039;d have to work in a more secure environment. Instead, I bailed on everything and went with the idea that I wanted the latitude that working for myself would offer,&amp;quot; she says.  Happy Medium:  While freelancing, Swanson decided she&amp;#039;d like to actually cook from all the cookbooks that had been gathering dust during her twenties. The blog was born. Her third cookbook, Super Natural Every Day, comes out this spring. On Being a Hit:  &amp;quot;Last month, I got 3 million page views. But more important to me is that a range of people are cooking my recipes. Teenagers will write me enthusiastically about learning to cook, as will older people whose doctors advised them to adjust their diets. I think my blog makes them feel cooking can be fun and delicious, rather than negative or a chore.&amp;quot;     Amanda Kludt   ny.eater.com Her Twist:  A do-it-all approach that covers restaurant reviews, food industry news, gossip, and events in an edgy but never snarky tone that lets insiders feel more so and new food fans or tourists feel instantly included.  Her Pull:  Eater is now in seven cities, but Kludt&amp;#039;s New York helms the empire, with 1.7 million monthly visitors. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re one of the few sites that will write bad stuff,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Restaurants try to curry favor, so we&amp;#039;ll think twice before reporting. And I go to lots of dinners and events. It gets hard when you start to know the people involved, but you have to do it.&amp;quot; Her Trajectory:  Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, Kludt, 27, studied journalism at New York University. After college she got a job at urban travel site Gridskipper, where she fell in love with the food coverage. &amp;quot;I constantly read Eater, and when I heard they needed someone to take over, I begged them. I was the most obsessive, so I got it.&amp;quot; On Post Anxiety:  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m responsible for 12 posts a day. You wake up not knowing what you&amp;#039;re going to do, but you learn that the news will come. Some days there&amp;#039;s so much happening you can&amp;#039;t write it fast enough; other days you think, I guess I&amp;#039;ll write a list. There&amp;#039;s always a way to fill the space.&amp;quot; On Long-term Career Planning:  &amp;quot;When I was at Gridskipper, people assumed you&amp;#039;d burn out after a year or two. But I&amp;#039;ve been here three years. We&amp;#039;ve got a 401(k) matching fund now!&amp;quot;  On Laptop Liberty:  &amp;quot;I spend mornings at home, then come into our 20-staff office because I get lonely. It&amp;#039;s good to have some banter and miss rush hour. But, yeah, I can work in pajamas. My grandmother bought me PajamaJeans. I said, `This is what&amp;#039;s wrong with America!&amp;#039; But one day I had to run to the deli and thought, These PajamaJeans just might be a good idea.&amp;quot; On Virtual Reality:  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve learned not to be on the Internet after six, but there are always parties to go to. It&amp;#039;s taken over my life. I don&amp;#039;t know what I&amp;#039;d do if I didn&amp;#039;t do this.&amp;quot;     H\u00E9l\u00E8ne Dujardin   tarteletteblog.com Her Twist:  Tartelette&amp;#039;s artful food styling and gorgeous photography equals print in quality. She combines the \u00ADimages with dessert recipes (gluten-free, which helps reduce her symptoms of M\u00E9ni\u00E8re&amp;#039;s disease) and upbeat narratives that telegraph her tag line: &amp;quot;the sweet side of life.&amp;quot;  Biggest Day:  &amp;quot;On an average day, I get 35,000 hits,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But when Ree Drummond [the hugely popular Pioneer Woman blogger] referenced my photography, my views spiked to 100,000.&amp;quot;  Her Trajectory:  Dujardin grew up baking at her maman&amp;#039;s and grandmama&amp;#039;s sides in Provence, France. While getting a degree in colonial history, she spent a year as an exchange student in Charleston, South Carolina, where she fell in love with her future husband, a professor and jazz musician. After returning home to break it to her parents that she&amp;#039;d met a man 20 years her senior, she returned to the South for good. Dujardin did leave academia, though. &amp;quot;I see what my husband deals with.&amp;quot; She got a job as a restaurant pastry chef, and, to help the evening staff plate her desserts properly, she started photographing them. Dujardin realized she loved taking the pictures, so she started her blog in 2006. This led to jobs as a cookbook and magazine photographer. An editor at John Wiley &amp;amp;amp; Sons approached her to do a book on the art of food shooting for laymen. Plate to Pixel: Digital Photography and Styling comes out in May.  What Keeps Her Updating:  &amp;quot;Everything I&amp;#039;ve arrived at came from the blog; it&amp;#039;s awesome. But that&amp;#039;s not why I do it. A woman once wrote and said that making one recipe a day from my site helped her recover from severe depression. She got it. It&amp;#039;s therapeutic for me too.&amp;quot;      Eddie Gehman Kohan   obamafoodorama.com Her Twist:  Dogged reporting on the 44th presidency and all things food.  Her Pull:  &amp;quot;Asking how many page views is like asking how big your johnson is. And in 2011, it&amp;#039;s an outdated question. It&amp;#039;s more who&amp;#039;s paying attention. I&amp;#039;m read around the world. Whenever the president visits a new country, those people get on board. Ethiopia started reading it when Marcus Samuelsson cooked for the president. Ethiopia! After I put the Obama Super Bowl recipes up, it got 10,000 hits within minutes. I&amp;#039;m the only lone-wolf blogger who has regular press access to the White House. Tomorrow I&amp;#039;ve been invited to a roundtable with the first lady, just me and 10 print reporters.&amp;quot;  Her Trajectory:  Kohan was brought up in Southern California by a family with little money (her father wrote the cultish Haphazard Gourmet cookbook). She put herself through Penn, where she majored in public and urban policy, with full-time jobs in the food industry. She went on to do an MFA at the University of Virginia on a Henry Hoyns poetry fellowship. She worked as a journalist, then opted out for about six years to raise her two children (&amp;quot;head of the PTA, the whole thing!&amp;quot;). She and two of her sisters founded a private trust to fund a blog called Haphazard Gourmet Girls. On it, she covered food during the elections, and from there spun it into Obamafoodorama. It&amp;#039;s a full-time job for her, with a managing editor and three interns. Scoop!  I consider this a historic document\u2014the Library of Congress is caching the site. I don&amp;#039;t try to break news. But I do. I was at a speech Sam Kass was giving in Dallas and I noticed they introduced him with a new senior White House title. I posted and the next day &amp;quot;Health Food Czar&amp;quot; was on the front of the Drudge Report.  The Surprise:  Kohan is a Republican. &amp;quot;People assume that anyone devoting their time to food and this presidency is a Democrat.&amp;quot; What&amp;#039;s Next:  A site redesign and two books: a memoir about a tattooed hipster going to Washington and a more serious food policy overview.    "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/travel-food/a11607/cooking-in-code-560582/>