This year Springpad wants to help you with your Thanksgiving meal planning and give you and a blogger a chance to win a little cash. Check out their Happy Springsgiving contest and pick your favorite Thanksgiving dishes from seven different menus selected by food bloggers, including yours truly. Vote for your favorites by springing your favorite recipe(s) to your Springpad account. The blogger whose menu gets the most total springs (votes) will win $500 and one lucky voter will be randomly selected to win $100. And of course I hope that one of my readers wins!

The other bloggers who entered the contest:

Back to the Cutting Board

Biscuits and Such

Coconut & Lime

Daily Unadventures in Cooking

Food Tastes Yummy

Healthy. Delicious.

Here’s my contest menu with a small family in mind:

Carrot Ginger Soup

Slow-Cooker Turkey Breast and Gravy

Brown Butter Green Beans with Almonds

Roasted Butternut Squash Puree with Ginger

Cranberry Orange Upside Down Cake with Grand Marnier Whipped Cream

I hope you have fun with the contest!

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In December 2008 our family hosted our first Drop In & Decorate event in our home. We opened our house up to friends and neighbors, anyone who wanted to drop by and make one cookie or several cookies to donate to families in need during the holiday season. Our local moms group helped 17 families with food, clothing, and toys, and the cookie decorators made a dozen cookies for each family. We had a wonderful time and hopefully made life a little more special for others with the gift of homemade cookies, and we plan to do it again this year.

Drop In & Decorate is a tax-exempt nonprofit organization founded by my friend food writer Lydia Walshin of The Perfect Pantry. The idea behind Drop In & Decorate is simple: bake some cookies; gather a group of family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, your worship group or book group to decorate the cookies together; donate the cookies to a nonprofit agency serving basic human needs in your own community.

It’s a simple idea in a complicated world, and something anyone can do. If you’d like to host your own Drop In & Decorate® event, Pillsbury and Wilton would like to help.

Pillsbury has donated 50 VIP coupons, worth $3.00 each, off any Pillsbury product—including sugar cookie mix and icing—to be distributed, first come, first served, while supply lasts, to anyone who plans to host a Drop In & Decorate event (maximum 5 coupons per person). And we’ll include a Comfort Grip cookie cutter, donated by Wilton, to people who plan to host cookies-for-donation events.

Write to lydia AT ninecooks DOT com for more information on how to get your free coupons and cookie cutters. You can find a free guide with everything you need to know to host your own cookie decorating party at http://www.dropinanddecorate.org/.

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Here are some highlights of the new springpad for people who love to cook, like you and me:

• Use the web clipper or click on the springpad partners’ Save It buttons to collect recipes from across the web,
• Create and add your own recipes,
• Personalize and share recipes by adding notes, photos and video,
• Automatically generate shopping lists,
• Access your recipes, shopping lists and meal plans on the go with the springpad mobile web app, and
• Use your recipes in one of springpad’s many apps, such as the Weekly Meal Planner.

The springpad community has hundreds of food bloggers, and the community has already shared more than 50,000 recipes and created more than 15,000 meal plans.

But springpad is more than just a site for organizing your favorite recipes. You can collect information from all over and organize it into online notebooks. The Blog Post Planner app helps you organize your blog ideas. You can keep wine notes using Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Notebook or get his wine recommendations in the Thunder List app. The Restaurant Tracker app lets you rate and keep notes on restaurants. Need something to help keep your holiday shopping organized? I do, and thankfully there’s a notebook for that. Be sure to view the springpad demo to get an idea of what the site can do to help you stay organized.

So what does it all mean for this blog? First, there is no change to how my site functions. I still write and post recipes, but you’ll now see a small button at the bottom of each recipe post. Click that button to save the recipe into your springpad account. The most recent recipes have the button and I’m going back through all the recipes over the next month or so adding the button to each. It will take me a little while to get it all done, and I thank you for your patience on that.

When you save a recipe from this site into springpad, this is a sample of what it will look like:

As you can see from the above screenshot, recipes in springpad look a little different than they do here. You’ll see just the ingredients and a little introduction to the recipe, but to get the full instructions and write up you still have to come visit me here on this site, and I hope you will!

If you want to find and follow me on springpad, please visit my profile. I hope you enjoy saving recipes from this site into your springpad, and of course please feel free to post any questions here in the comments.

Thanks for reading Andrea’s Recipes through a feed! Copyright © 2005-2009 Andrea’s Recipes.

Before I go any further, I need to confess something. I was really bad last weekend.

I schlepped my camera all the way across the continent to the BlogHer Food Conference. Then I didn’t take a single picture. Nada.

There’s just something about actually having time for stimulating conversation with fascinating people that makes me forget I have a camera with me for a purpose, not just a weight to lug around. I kicked myself all the way home. If a blogging goddess exists, she would probably revoke my blogger credentials.

Fortunately at least one person has photographic evidence that I actually attended and had a grand time. Ree made me giggle when she put the camera up to my face then I couldn’t stop! Plus it was 2:00 A.M. East Coast time, I was tired and had no idea which way was up. Good thing I only sipped 1.5 glasses of wine at the Mushroom Channel party earlier.

My favorite memories from the weekend:

~Bumping into Elise, Jaden, and Jenny (party planner extraordinaire) at Tropisueno on Friday afternoon. Had a quick and delicious lunch together, loved talking with them, they are so friendly.

~Some fantastic conversation with Alanna, Sean and DPaul, Diane, Jori, Erin, and Stephanie at The Mushroom Channel party. I also got to meet Heidi, one of my heroes. (There are a few other people I chatted with at the party whose names I can’t remember—so sorry, was operating on only about three hours of sleep that day—so please jog my memory and I’ll add you here!)

~The walk back to the hotel with Alanna and just getting to chat quietly, like long lost friends. Then she invited me to join her for a swag bag stuffing party with Elise, Jaden, Jenny, and Ree, but we missed the stuffing part. However, the conversation was hilarious and I can’t remember the last time I laughed like that. These gals are so much fun to hang with! And to add something completely unrelated but somehow relevant, Ree has amazing ballerina flexibility! Don’t ask how we got on that topic, I can’t remember.

~Dinner at Contigo with Lydia, Kalyn, Susan, T.W., Val, and Rebecca. That was a truly memorable meal with great company. If I had taken my camera along (insert sounds of me thumping self on the head) I could have waxed poetic just on Contigo. If you go to San Francisco, it’s a must, and you absolutely should try the tripe with chorizo and chickpeas (loved the smoky paprika) and the patatas bravas with allioli and salsa brava. Well, you can skip the tripe if you are veg.

~Meeting and laughing with Denise and Lenny and meeting Lisa Stone. And filed under Strange Happenings: swapping stories of hilarious San Francisco street sightings with Carrie.

~Getting to meet/hug some of my favorite bloggers, even if we didn’t get to spend much time together: Helen, Jen, Lynda, Alice, Kristen, Hank.

~The food photography sessions. Such a short amount of time and loads of information shared. My fingers got a workout while typing! Thanks to Heidi, Matt, Diane and Todd, and Lara for sharing your knowledge and talent with us.

Then there were so many people I wanted to meet or talk with again and just missed them. Jennifer, Amy, and Biggie, I’m glad we at least got to say “Hi!” again. Others like Susan, Garrett, Nicole, and Zoe I saw from afar but never quite got to connect. Hopefully will have another opportunity soon.

And I missed meeting David, my ice cream hero, but I was just too darn shy to go up and stand in his adoring throng after the keynote, so that’s my fault.

It was a whirlwind weekend filled with wonderful people and experiences that moved me and left indelible memories and a desire for more. Perhaps a BlogHer Food Conference 2010? Even on the East Coast? Washington D.C. is a great food city (hint hint)!

P.S. Check out the Flickr photostream for pics from BlogHer Food ‘09.

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I must say after my first visit to the site I was sucked in. It’s a home design site where you can save photos of rooms, landscapes, and home design ideas. Anyone can use it and you can upload your own photos, plus the site has almost 4,000 professional designers and architects who upload photos of their work for you to browse. Photos are grouped by design style, living space, and metro region, and you can add design element keywords. You can even tag individual items in photos and add a URL, brand name, or other descriptive information. You can create ideabooks, which allow you to group ideas for a room, backyard, color schemes, anything you can think of. If you used to keep a scrapbook with pictures of designs you liked, now you can do it online and share your ideabooks.

This interview focused on the design of the house, so there’s photos of the dining room and living room as well as the kitchen. I hope you enjoy it! Also, Houzz.com is offering a giveaway with the interview, three copies of the Weight Watchers Momentum Cookbook, so enter for a chance to win.

Houzz.com – Interview with Food Blogger Andrea Meyers

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CafeMom: In the Kitchen With Andrea Meyers

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Food blogging and food photography have been the total opposite for me. I started this site on a lark three and a half years ago and had no idea what I was doing when I picked up our little point and shoot camera and snapped my first food photo. I didn’t sit down with a photography book in an attempt to cram all the knowledge I could into my brain, I just experimented with mixed success. It was a hobby, after all, just something fun I did for a creative outlet without any professional aspirations. Never in my wildest dreams did I think someday I would have food photos published in a cookbook, so I now find myself at a loss for words to express my delight that some of my food photos were chosen to grace the pages of the newly released The Gilded Fork Entertaining At Home: A Year of Dinner Parties by Jennifer Iannolo and Chef Mark Tafoya.

When Chef Mark tweeted about looking for recipe testers for the book, I threw my name in the hat. Over the course of a month I tested four recipes and sent in my feedback as well as photos of the food, all the while thinking how much fun I had doing the testing (and tasting) and wondering if any of my photos were good enough for the book. You can imagine my surprise when Jennifer and Mark said they wanted to use three of my photos! When I received the published book in the mail yesterday and saw the kind notes Jennifer and Mark had written inside the cover and my three photos in the book as well as one on the back cover, I got a little lump in my throat.

None of this was planned, I just jumped in for the fun of working on a cookbook, and for taking a chance I got a lot of personal satisfaction and a little recognition. The project boosted my confidence and motivated me to continue improving my photography and writing. To Chef Mark and Jennifer, hugs and thanks for opening this project up to bloggers and for giving this amateur a chance.

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It’s time for the next round of Grow Your Own, the blogging event that celebrates the foods we grow or raise ourselves and the dishes we make using our homegrown products. Many thanks to Graziana of Erbe in Cucina for hosting our last round, Grow Your Own #30.

Anyone with a blog can participate, whether you write about food, gardening, your family, crafts, whatever. The rules are simple.

• Make a dish that uses at least one item from your very own garden or farm and post about it. Your garden doesn’t have to be big. Container gardens are welcome. If you hunted or foraged, those items are also eligible. You can also use something that was given to you, but the giver must have personally grown, raised, hunted, or foraged the item. If you or someone else paid for it, then it doesn’t count.

• Anything edible that you have grown, raised, hunted, or foraged qualifies, including fruits, vegetables, herbs, sprouts, edible flowers, nuts, grains, legumes, dairy products, eggs, livestock, and anything else I might have forgotten. Produce from both indoor and outdoor gardens are welcome! Different regions will have different things available, so feel free to feature things unique to your area. (Rambutan trees, anyone?) We like to celebrate variety.

Please send me an email at andreasrecipesgyo AT gmail DOT com and include the following information:

• Subject line: Grow Your Own #31
• Your name and location (country, state if applicable)
• Your blog URL
• Permalink to your post
• 300×300 pixel photo of your dish (As long as the photo is no larger than 300 pixels in either direction, it will work.)

Deadline for entries is July 15 and I will post a round-up within a day or two after. I hope you will join us!

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Milk and Honey Lavender Sorbet. I like using lavender in desserts, and this sorbet is delicious. Very refreshing, a perfect after dinner lift.

Lavender Pound Cake with Lemon Glaze, such a delicious combination. You can make these mini size or in a regular 12 cup Bundt pan, but I prefer the minis.

Steak with Champagne Braised Cippolini Onions and Sage Butter. I could eat those champagne onions every day.

Caramelized Apple Bread Pudding. I’m not normally a bread pudding fan, but anything with the words “caramelized apple” in the title is not to be missed in my book, and this did not disappoint. Makes a decadent desert with the cider caramel sauce or a tasty breakfast with maple syrup.

A number of bloggers have been testing recipes for Chef Mark and his team, so be sure to check out the posts about The Gilded Fork Cookbook at The Culinary Media Network and be on the lookout for announcements about the publish date. Thanks to Mark and the rest of the team for the opportunity!

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Congratulations to my fellow nominees in the Family/Kids category: Foodie Tots, Picky Palate, Under the High Chair, and The Barefoot Kitchen Witch. Please stop by their blogs and offer some hearty congratulations.

Voting is open from now until January 24th 8 pm EST, and the winners will be announced on Monday January 26. There are 14 categories of wonderful food blogs, and if some of your favorites received nominations, I know they would appreciate your vote.

Thanks especially to my readers. Your comments and emails never fail to bring a smile to my face and you’ve made the last three years of blogging even more enjoyable.

Thanks for reading Andrea’s Recipes through a feed! Copyright © 2005-2009 Andrea’s Recipes.