Persimmon beats vanilla

You know how you notice the make and model of every car at an intersection when you’re in the market to buy a new car? I’ve been reading other people’s blogs for years, but now that I am immersed in the process of creating one myself it feels like I am suddenly seeing them for the first time. It’s only after learning even the basic rudiments of blog building that I can begin to deconstruct other people’s creations and critique their use of the medium.

I was already familiar with several cooking blogs because I have been writing up my own vegetarian recipes–about 130 of them at this point, each one intended to work as a stand-alone article–for the last two years. In the course of researching ingredients and recipes I have bookmarked many vegan and vegetarian sites with the most innovative approaches so that I could return to them for reference purposes.

PostPunkKitchen is a web site, a public access vegan cooking show (described as “currently on hiatus”) and a blog hosted by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and her team. The site is edgy, chaotic but confident and sophisticated. The warm and spicy color palette of pumpkin and persimmon reinforces a sense of passion and spontaneity. It doesn’t take too long to figure out that Isa is featuring 3 books as “Hot Stuff” on the Home Page of her site. Her opus, Veganomicon, is currently sold on the endcap displays at Whole Foods Market, proof of her marketing success. The site feels disorganized, but the hyperlinked, layered pages and long list of sidebar links encourage the reader to linger and explore.

Conversely, Vegan Yum Yum, Lauren Ulm’s site promoting a book of the same name, is hard to get excited about. In spite of the really gorgeous photography, which Ulm explains at length on her “About” page (this is not unusual–I have seen this same attention to photographic technique on other sites), Vegan Yum Yum feels static and unimaginative. The pastel colors and the straight-forward layout might be within acceptable limits if Ulm used the capacity of the web medium to enrich the sidebar with helpful reader links, rather than stuffing it with ads and self-promotion. Finally, especially in the case of a blog that features a writer, it is hard to justify the presence of careless typos and even worse, the use of the meaningless word “awesome” (in this case twice in one paragraph, once in caps)–a cardinal diction sin in virtually any context unless you are a thirteen-year-old.