Cross-posted at Simply Recipes  My mother is one of those intuitive cooks in the kitchen. 73 years old, and having raised six kids, she doesn't follow recipes anymore. If you watch her while she cooks, the timing just appears to happen seamlessly. Whereas I'm good for only making one dish at a time, mom can coordinate a whole meal for 8 - a main course protein, one or two veggie sides, a starch, and a salad - without getting remotely flustered. She's always tasting whatever she is cooking, and adjusting the seasonings. She cooks from memory and a well developed sense of what works together well, and how flavors come in balance.

This article is a part of a series of posts on How to Build Blog Traffic (see Intro). One of the key ways that people find your site is through a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Placing highly on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) when someone is doing a search will almost guarantee lots of traffic of new visitors to your site. In fact, search engine results placement is so important for the business models of thousands of web-based companies that an entire industry of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professionals exists to advise people on how to score better in the search returns.

Growing up a city girl in Los Angeles, I was always fascinated by farms and orchards. I still have vibrant memories of picking pears and hunting rabbits in Antelope valley with my dad. Such a different world of nature than the manicured lawn of our home in the city. In our hectic modern lives we don't often stop to think where are food comes from. Who grew this tomato? Where did this chicken live, and how was it (she) housed?

The New York Times recently ran a piece by Julia Moskin on the current trend away from glorification of celebrity chefs and back to regular home cooking. (See Food for the People, Whipped Up by the People.)

Google recently released a very cool new feature. Google is now letting us create our own custom search engines, based on a list of websites that we choose. I've started playing around with it here at FoodBlogSearch.com. I often like to link to other food blogs in my posts on my recipe blog and this custom search makes it easy to search the food blogs I frequent.