Virtual Bake Sale For a Good Cause This Thursday

I met some awesome food bloggers in September at IFBC, one of whom was Alice Bush who was a table mate at a dinner at Re:Public. We we wined and dined until midnight and had fun with a host from Urbanspoon, who organized the evening of sending out hoards of food bloggers in groups of 8-12 to restaurants all over Seattle and the Eastside.

So when blogger Alice Bush approached me about donating to an on-line bake sale to raise funds for a friend that was in desperate need of a costly operation, I didn't hesitate. For one, I love bake sales, and also because food bloggers are one of my tribes, my community. People talk a lot about the loss of community, that neighbors don't know each other, and I agree that it's a problem, but we also have new communities, virtual neighbors who gather and host things like virtual bake sales.

I've put up my book for the auction. There are lots of actual baked goods on the auction too. The auction runs all day Thursday, December 12th from 8am to 9pm, then items will be mailed out in time for the holidays. How easy is that? To read about her friend, and view the list of auction items, go to Alice's blog, A Mama, Baby & Shar-pei in the Kitchen.

IFBC here I come!

I can't believe it's almost here - the International Food Bloggers Conference! When I heard that it would be in Seattle, it was of course a no-brainer to sign up, but that seemed ages ago. A summer season of catering ago. Now it's less that one week away and I can't wait.

A few highlights that I'm looking forward to, or curious about:

Live Food Blogging with Amazon Grocery. We'll be tasting foods and blogging "speed dating-style." With only 2.5 minutes to taste and 2.5 minutes to blog, it should be a good exercise for someone like me who holds on to posts for months without publishing.

A session on Food Photography with New York Times photographer Andrew Scrivani. He's also doing a session on post-production photo editing that I will have to miss as I'm catering a wedding that night. Se la vie!  As you may know, I've vowed to step up my photography this year. I think I've made progress, but have a long way to go.

A number of technical sessions that I need on building traffic and whether or not to switch to Wordpress. I know not having a designated URL and staying in the .blogspot group greatly lessens my exposure in the blogsphere. I haven't had, or haven't made the swaths of time that is required for me to do big technological changes. (Right now I have to get my laptop to recognize wi-fi, and fix my darn camera. I've been hamstrung all summer by technical difficulties). So these sessions will be good for me and kick my butt into making all this technology work together.

And though I'll miss a number of sessions on Saturday evening because of our catering, it's probably for the best: I usually get overwhelmed by the amount of information at a conference. A little break will do this girl some good.

I'll be doing some "live blogging" or nearly live during the conference to give my thoughts on various sessions. What I'm really excited is to see my good friends Barry Martin, of Our Community Table and Welcome to the Cookout! and Jane Bonacci of The Heritage Cook. Both are way beyond me in food blogging and wonderful people. I met them via the Char-Broil All-Stars.

If you are one of the 320 attendees, say howdy!