10 Oct A Season of Changes
It’s apt that I write this from the floor of an airport gate –- JFK this time. If you’ve been following along with our blogs and podcasts, you know that Chef Mark and I have become veritable road warriors as of late. Since August we’ve seen Miami, Mexico (Guadalajara and Tequila), San Francisco, Italy (Bolzano, Asiago and Venezia), and we’ve just gotten back from Las Vegas.
Why so much travel? Well, I’m giddy to say that we’ve got some announcements to share with you, and it’s been very difficult to keep ourselves quiet, though we have dropped a few hints here and there! At last, however, we can unveil two of the big ones:
Firstly, we are proud and ecstatic to announce the launch of our first video mini-series, On the Tequila Trail, which we’ve done in partnership with our friends at Partida Tequila. We’ve spent the past few months shooting a 5-episode series in Mexico and the U.S. — I have the blue agave “stab scar” to show for it — and Las Vegas was our last stop on the trail. If you think Tequila is just for slamming with some lime and salt, think again: This libation is for sipping – and for making what I consider, hands down, to be the best margarita on earth (and I’m quite a connoisseur of those babies, so trust me on this one). The first two episodes are now live, and the rest will appear weekly on the Culinary Podcast Network.
Speaking of which, that’s the other big change, because you see, it’s no longer the Culinary Podcast Network (I suppose I should have started that sentence with “secondly”). We have so much happening in so many forms, it made sense to create a more appropriate name for what we’re doing, so we are now operating as the Culinary Media Network. Ta-da! Soon we will be putting the entire Gilded Fork site under the CMN banner, so you will see us continue to tweak things in the next few months. For now the new www.culinarymedianetwork.com URL points to our CPN blog.
In preparation for the new umbrella site, we are simplifying sections of the Gilded Fork, so all articles from a given section appear on the main pages. We realized that with the old content structure, many of you may not have seen our hundreds and hundreds of articles and recipes — there’s a lot to peruse!
Now, for example, in Cooking you will find all of our ingredient dossiers and features, recipes and tutorials; in Entertaining you will find all of our tips, dinner menus and cocktails; in Articles you will find every article that has ever been published here in the past 2 1/2 years — and there are a lot of them! Recipes still has all of our yummy creations, of course, but we tidied up the page a bit. The bottom line: no more clicking around to find things (hooray!) — each section has a main picture that will take you to the area/listing you want.
You might also notice that we have phased out the “Table of Contents” as an individual page, and combined it with our home page. Now you can find the gateway to everything in one place.
We will continue to implement further changes as we go, so if you have any comments or suggestions, we of course welcome them. Just sent an e-mail to feedback [at] gildedfork [dot] com. Don’t forget there is also a search feature if you have trouble finding anything.
In food news (the more delicious part of our work), we have delved into cranberries in preparation for the Big Day next month, so there will be lots of recipe ideas headed your way. I simply have to say out loud that I cannot believe Turkey Day is almost here. I could have sworn we just finished August.
In travel news, Chef Mark and I will continue our adventures through the end of the year, so we will be bringing you news from Boston and Denver (and wherever else the road may lead us). If we happen to be coming to your town, we will announce it on the Culinary Media Network -– and we hope you’ll let us know where you are! We’d love to arrange a meetup while we’re there — we did that in San Francisco and had a fantastic time, so we’ll post our locations as soon as we know them.
You can also follow us via our new mini-podcast, “Fork in the Road,” which we attempt to record while we’re on the plane, train, boat, or stranded at the airport. It lets us show you a little slice of life as we seek out food adventures around the globe.
There is lots of excitement happening around here, so we hope you will peruse our creations both new and old, and continue to share in our food adventures. We wouldn’t have it any other way!
(Psst…you can see photos from all of our adventures on my new Flickr page.)