The Christmas Table by Gooseberry Patch {We're getting published!}

We were so excited to receive a letter last week from Gooseberry Patch, letting us know one of our recipes has been selected for publication in The Christmas Table, expected to be published in June of this year!  Which recipe, you may wonder?  Well now, we wouldn't want to ruin the surprise... that would be like telling you the ending of a great movie you're about to watch for the first time!

You may remember that Gooseberry Patch cookbooks are some of my favorite, because not only do you get wonderful recipes, but they also include creative tips.

The Christmas Table is expected to be available at Amazon.com by June 16, 2012!  You can pre-order copies now though!

Stay tuned ... we will host a giveaway when it is released.  Subscribe to receive free email updates or follow us on Facebook or Twitter so you won't miss it!

 

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Lowcountry Fish Stew {Gullah Cuisine}

This Lowcountry Fish Stew recipe is another Gullah Cuisine dish, and if, like us, you're always looking for new ways to incorporate more seafood into your diet, you will really enjoy this one.  I created this recipe out of ingredients we bought on sale when grocery shopping this week.  Normally, this is made with catfish, but flounder was what was on sale, and it turned out wonderfully with the flounder.

The Lucky Wife has started learning the method to the couponing madness as one of our New Year's goals is to try to get more out of our food dollar.  You will be seeing many budget-friendly recipes this year as a result.

We really liked the way this stew turned out, and it was definitely a favorite of The Well-Fed Daughter's.  She wasted no time with it from the moment we put it in front of her until her bowl was empty!  That's rare for her.

Enjoy.

Lowcountry Fish Stew

Ingredients:

• 4 fish filets, cut into 1-inch cubes
• 1 onion, medium-diced
• 1 bell pepper, medium-diced
• 2 stalks celery, diced
• 2 cans tomatoes
• 3 large cloves garlic, minced
• 3 Russett potatoes, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
• 6 cups chicken broth
• 2 Bay leaves
• 2 teaspoons Old Bay seasoning
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

Instructions:

1. Heat 6-quart stockpot over medium heat until hot. Add olive oil and onion. Saute onion approximately 1 minute.
2. Add bell pepper, celery and garlic. Saute vegetables until onion is soft. Stir constantly to avoid browning the garlic.
3. Add tomatoes with juice and combine thoroughly. Saute for additional 1 minute.
4. Add chicken broth and bring to strong simmer.
5. Add potatoes and remaining seasonings. Simmer for approximately 15-20 minutes or until potatoes are fork tender. Once potatoes are tender, reduce heat and bring stew down to slow simmer.
6. Carefully, gently, add cubed fish. Simmer slowly 5 minutes or until pure white and flaky. (NOTE: Be careful to simmer slowly on low temperature so fish will not break apart due to convection.)

NEED ANY OF THE TOOLS USED?

Rating scale

1 star - Feed it to the dog
2 stars - Surprise your neighbor

3 stars - Definite keeper

4 stars - Looking forward to leftovers

5 stars - Clean plate and nap time! Are there enough ingredients left to make it again soon?

The Chef - 4 Stars

The Lucky Wife - 4 Stars

The Well-Fed Son (5 years old) - 4 Stars
The Well-Fed Daughter (17 months old) - 5 Stars

*Rate it yourself in the comments!

Come join SoupaPalooza at TidyMom and Dine and Dish sponsored by KitchenAid, Red Star Yeast and Le Creuset

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Find more great recipes at Foodie Friday, Tatertots and Jello

Frogmore Stew, Also Known as Beaufort Stew (and Lowcountry Boil): Another Gullah Cuisine Recipe

This Saturday evening, we're serving up a favorite Gullah Cuisine recipe, Frogmore Stew, (also known as Beaufort Stew AND Lowcountry Boil), at least for The Lucky Wife and me.  The Well-Fed Son thought the corn was spicy but loved the shrimp and sausage.  Go figure.  The Well-Fed Daughter, with her inexperienced palate, did not care for it, until The Lucky Wife mixed the sausage and potatoes (too young for shrimp and the corn doesn't agree with her) with some rice and butter for lunch the next day.  She gobbled that up!

This is simple, easy and great for large gatherings.  In this case, I make larger quantities and cook it outdoors in my turkey fryer.

The seasoning can be customized pretty much any way you choose.  A friend of mine does not care for potatoes, and for a substitute adds uncracked eggs to the stock.  (Makes boiled eggs.)  He then eats them with a dash of hot sauce.  He also enjoys adding a few clams to the mix.

The main thing is to have a sunny day, friends around and a few laughs.  Enjoy.

Frogmore Stew (aka Beaufort Stew)

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 pounds large raw shrimp, peeled, deveined and tail on
• 1 pound turkey smoked sausage, cut into 2-inch sections
• 1 1/2 pounds petite red potatoes
• 6 to 8 frozen half-ears sweet corn
• 1 bag in a box Zatarain's crab boil seasoning packet
• 1 bottle of beer
• dash Old Bay seasoning

Instructions:

1. Fill a large 6-quart stockpot with approximately 4 quarts of water and bottle of beer. Place seasoning bag in pot and bring to a boil.
2. As soon as water comes to rolling boil, add potatoes and bring water back to boil.
3. Add corn and bring water back to boil.
4. Add sausage and bring water back to boil.
5. Test potatoes with a fork -- should be fork-tender.  If not, continue to boil until potatoes are done.
6. Add shrimp and as soon as water comes back to boil, turn off heat and move pot off burner. (NOTE: Shrimp will continue to cook in the hot water. If you boil shrimp for any length of time, they risk becoming tough. The cooked shrimp should be firm and bright white and pink in color. If they are grayish or "milky" in appearance, they are not fully cooked.)
7. Once shrimp is cooked, ladle meat and vegetables into a large platter (or sheet pan will also work). Discard seasoning bag and stock. Sprinkle meat and vegetables lightly with Old Bay seasoning and serve immediately.

NEED ANY OF THE TOOLS USED?

Rating scale

1 star - Feed it to the dog
2 stars - Surprise your neighbor

3 stars - Definite keeper

4 stars - Looking forward to leftovers

5 stars - Clean plate and nap time! Are there enough ingredients left to make it again soon?

The Chef - 5 Stars

The Lucky Wife - 4 Stars

The Well-Fed Son (5 years old) - 2 Stars
The Well-Fed Daughter (17 months old) - 3 Stars

*Rate it yourself in the comments!

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Gullah Cuisine Recipe: Okra Rice

This Saturday evening's Okra Rice recipe brings you a Gullah Cuisine classic.  Gullah Cuisine is characterized by cooking with what's available, which happens to be how this recipe came about.  I literally looked in the fridge and cabinets, found these ingredients, and threw together what I had.  In a perfect world, I would prefer to have used Louisiana-style Andouille sausage or just plain smoked sausage, but I did not have these on-hand.  So I substituted breakfast sausage.


Enjoy.

Okra Rice

Ingredients:

• 2 cups frozen cut okra
• 2 cups uncooked white rice
• 5 frozen turkey sausage patties, thawed and diced
• 2 Roma tomatoes, diced
• 1 medium sweet onion, chopped
• 32 ounces chicken broth
• 1 bell pepper, diced
• 1/4 teaspoon each: salt, black pepper, basil, thyme, oregano
• 2 Bay leaves
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

Instructions:

1. Place frozen okra in microwave-safe container with a lid and microwave until okra is thawed and tender, approximately 2 minutes on high heat. Set aside.
2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
3. Heat large non-stick skillet over medium-high heat until hot. Add olive oil and onions and saute onions until soft.
4. Add bell peppers and sausage. Saute approximately 1 minute.
5. Add okra and tomatoes. Toss vegetables thoroughly.
6. Season with herbs and salt and pepper. Stir thoroughly to evenly distribute spices.
7. Add uncooked rice and stir into vegetables until rice and vegetables are thoroughly combined and coated with oil.
8. Remove from heat and spoon vegetable rice mixture into 9 x 13 baking dish. Slowly add chicken broth to casserole dish until rice/vegetable mixture is completely covered. (May need to add a little water to make sure rice is completely submerged.)
9. Add Bay leaves. Cover casserole dish with tin foil and place in pre-heated oven. Bake for 1 hour or until liquid is absorbed and rice is tender. Remove Bay leaves and fluff with a fork.

NEED ANY OF THE TOOLS USED?

Rating scale

1 star - Feed it to the dog
2 stars - Surprise your neighbor

3 stars - Definite keeper

4 stars - Looking forward to leftovers

5 stars - Clean plate and nap time! Are there enough ingredients left to make it again soon?

The Chef - 4 Stars

The Lucky Wife - 3 Stars

The Well-Fed Son (5 years old) - 4 Stars
The Well-Fed Daughter (16 months old) - 4 Stars

*Rate it yourself in the comments!

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Who are The Chef and The Lucky Wife? {Faithful Bloggers Podcast Interview}

Now that our Christmas series has ended and as a way to begin a new year and our second year blogging, we wanted to share the transcript from our podcast interview, which was recorded and published by Courtney at Faithful Bloggers back in September.  Keep reading to learn more about us, our faith testimonies, how and why we started our blog, how we hope to make a difference through the blog, some of the bloggers that have been an encouragement to us or whom we admire, and more.

Please know that some of you reading this who also blog have had a major positive impact on us during this first year blogging, and while we would have loved to have included everyone, time, unfortunately, never permits this!  A big thank you to all fellow bloggers for the ways you enrich the lives of others every day.  We are constantly amazed by what we learn from you.

You can download an mp3 file of the podcast here and listen to it as you read along if you would like.

Courtney:

For this week’s podcast, I have Anne and John with me from the blog, The Saturday Evening Pot, which you can find at www.thesaturdayeveningpot.com. Thanks for joining us, Anne and John. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about your blog and maybe where we can find you online? 

Anne:

Okay. Sure. My name is Anne, and you can find us online on Twitter at The Sat, S-A-T, Eve, E-V-E, Pot, P-O-T. And then on Facebook our page is just The Saturday Evening Pot. I grew up in a Christian home and was adopted when I was 2 years old and was in church pretty much my whole childhood and then accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior when I was 12, was baptized but didn’t really grow as a Christian too much until, I’d say, I was in the youth group at the church where I grew up.

I was really involved in the youth group and it was a very active group. And we had summer camps and a lot of fun activities, so I grew a lot during those times and then even more so in college. And I met my husband, John, in college my junior year, and we got married, I guess it was about a year after I graduated and didn’t really wanna start a family right away, wanted to have some time together and get established and things like that, kind of said not gonna have children for maybe five years. And it ended up being more like seven or eight years when we adopted our son in 2008 and then had our daughter last year. It’s been - she just celebrated her one year birthday, excuse me, in August. And so that’s - that’s pretty much my story. 

Courtney:

Yeah. Youth camp meant a lot to me when I was growing up, the youth group and the summer camps, and hearing you talk about that, too, that kind of - I love hearing stories like that. I got saved at a youth camp, so I always have fond memories and I love hearing other people’s stories about it. 

John:

I guess it’s my turn. I was born in a Christian home, attended a Christian school, kindergarten all the way through 12th grade. My mom still teaches school, teaches kindergarten at my old high school - elementary school. She’s been teaching kindergarten for 31 years now. I got saved when I was 5 years old at a summer camp but really wasn’t discipled. It was more of a fire insurance type salvation, if you will.

It wasn’t until I was about 21 years old after suffering a industrial accident when I was working and had a severe hand injury, had to have emergency surgery. I just felt the Lord using that to get my attention, and I guess you could say that the rest is history. After Anne and I got married after graduating from college, I worked for a police department for three and a half years and then decided to do a career change and went to culinary school and have been a Foodie ever since. 

Courtney:

That’s a big change. 

John:

[Inaudible] But that kinda -- through the process of time [inaudible] the blog and sharing our experiences. And it’s a very big hobby for Anne and myself. [inaudible] trying new restaurants and experience new food, and we just have fun with it. 

Courtney:

Right. That’s awesome. So tell the listeners when you started blogging and how you got started, if you don’t mind, why you chose Blogger as your platform. 

Anne:

[Crosstalk] [inaudible] the year 2011, really, kind of as a New Year’s project to do together. And we just started with basically getting the blog up as far as the website and everything was concerned, getting a design together. And we actually ended up changing our original design pretty soon after we started the blog. And we started out with Wordpress, but I really couldn’t figure out all of the technical stuff of self-hosting yet. We kind of started it pretty quickly when we decided to do it, and I didn’t have the time to figure all of that out.

So I started with just the Wordpress free blog templates and then switched over to Blogger. I’ve been reading a lot about Wordpress and the benefits of using the self-hosted Wordpress-type blogs and thinking about switching over at some point [inaudible] - do that whenever I can learn how to do all of that. 

Courtney:

Yeah, especially if you’ve never done it before, it can be a little bit of a learning curve. So how did you come up with your name, The Saturday Evening Pot? 

John:

Well, to be honest, I stole it, if you will. We, when we decided to start blogging, it was really more of an interest of Anne’s, the actual concept of blogging. You’ll find out after talking with us that she is the techie and I’m the cook. To be honest, we decided when we were gonna start blogging we were just gonna do it once a week. And with my current work schedule, my full-time work schedule, the only time that we could really dedicate any time in our lives to blogging and trying recipes and all that’s involved in it was on Saturdays.

So I started thinking about the day, Saturday, and I believe I had just seen a cover of The Saturday Evening Post in a magazine or something like that or on a TV show or something of that nature. And it just kinda clicked, and I said well, why don’t we change and do a little bit of a twist on The Saturday Evening Post and call it The Saturday Evening Pot? And because the original plan was to only do a post every Saturday in the beginning, until and if an interest built up in the blog and we started getting some higher levels of traffic, thereby maybe increasing the need for posts, so that’s where it came from. 

Courtney:

Gotcha. Cool. So what’s the goal with your blog? What do you hope to accomplish? 

John:

Well, originally, it kinda started out as a hobby for both of us. I graduated from Johnson and Wales Culinary School back in 2002 and was in the restaurant business for about a year but got out of it for one thing or the other. But cooking is what brings me joy. Cooking is my favorite hobby. To be honest, it’s how I relax. When I’m very stressed out from work, I’ll disappear into the kitchen and just kinda get lost in what’s going on on the stove.

And we decided to basically, number one, use it as a way to store recipes because I’m a habitual creator without writing recipes. I start cooking and I don’t measure, and I don’t remember things well. And so, instead of having stacks of paper scattered all over, we decided just to [inaudible] I guess, I don’t wanna put words in her mouth, but she had also gotten very interested in the whole concept of blogging. 

Courtney:

Yeah. 

John:

So we married the two, and then, shortly after we started blogging, we decided that there has to be some way that we can use the talent that obviously God has given me for cooking - and I’m by no means the best out there, but I have fun with it and people seem to enjoy it - and there has to be some way that we can use that talent for the Lord. Because everything that we own, everything that we have is on loan from him, and He’s waiting to see what we’re gonna do with it. And you need to use your gifts. We’re charged to use our gifts for His glory. 

Courtney:

That’s right. 

John:

And if you’ll notice, on our blog we have a recipe series called Feast of the Ages, where we are sharing our faith.  We’re sharing the gospel by way of a 21-course formal recipe series that we’ve put our imaginations in gear and tried to imagine what the Feast of the Ages, the wedding supper of the Lamb, is gonna be like when we’re all together in heaven.  So we kinda married the two using recipes and food to get people curious about Christ.

 Courtney:

That’s awesome. Well, that kinda answered my next question, too, about how you incorporate your faith in your blog. But I really like this Feast of the Ages thing you’ve got going. That’s really cool. So y’all doing anything else to incorporate your faith, or is that the main thing? 

Anne:

That is the main thing that we have pretty much, I guess, started with. I’m always thinking up new ideas and getting new ideas and talking to John about them. He has the - more of the creative side as far as if I’ve got an idea that I want a catchy title, he usually can come up with the name of the blog or the catchy title or the delicious recipe. But we - as passionate as we are about food, I hope that we’re more passionate about our faith, and we also, obviously, are passionate about adoption, it being a big part of my life and now our family with our son.

And we just posted a blog today, actually, about a passion we have through our experiences with adoption and our son to help children who are in a similar situation that he was in. Because when he came home, he was very malnourished and sick, and we - or I listened to a webinar just recently about the impact of poor nutrition on institutionalized children. And it was presented by a board member of an organization, called The Spoon Foundation, and they’ve got a really interesting and I think it’s gonna be powerful - a powerful project that they’ve started called The Orphan Nutrition project. They’re trying to help governments all over the world in the way that they nourish children in institutions, trying to change how that’s done so that children can have a better, healthier start. So - 

Courtney:

I noticed that - go ahead, sorry.

Anne:

No. I was just gonna say so we recently decided that we want to give to The Spoon Foundation part of any profits that we make off of the blog as a way to give back and to, I guess, share our passion and make a difference. 

Courtney:

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. That’s what I was gonna ask about, and you just answered my question. That’s cool. 

Anne:

Yeah. Yeah. We - you know, when we adopted Nicholas, one of the verses that came to mind was where the Bible says that religion that God accepts as pure and faultless is to care for orphans and widows. 

Courtney:

Right. Yeah. 

Anne:

Yeah. And so that - that’s another big way that we’re bringing our faith into the blog, and we also are gonna be starting a Christmas event September 6, called The 100-Day Countdown to Christmas. It’s gonna be - I’m sorry, not September 6, September 16th, and it will go from the 16th through Christmas Eve. There will be a daily post, which is kind of daunting, but I’m working on those right now getting drafts written up.

And that’s going to feature a lot of other bloggers that we’ve come across - or blogs that we’ve come across with different Christmas ideas, recipes, and things like that. And I’m also going to have a - part of those posts that will be - it may not be all of them, but some of them will have a celebrating the reason for the season where we have an idea to basically keep Christ in Christmas. 

Courtney:

Cool. Sounds like fun. It’s a lot of work, but fun. Okay. The next question: Do you have any bloggers you look up to or that have really encouraged you by blogging? 

Anne:

I do. Early on, I did some research and just tried to, I guess, kinda get a feel for what other bloggers are doing and how do you succeed as a blogger and anything in life, and one thing that I’ve learned is to look at what other people who are successful are doing and learn from them. 

Courtney:

Right. 

Anne:

And there is another food blogger - her name is Kristen, Dine and Dish - and she has a program that she started, called Adopt a Blogger. But when I was looking at that, she had - I guess temporarily was not taking any new requests, but I was kind of I guess eager to learn from other people and had some ideas. And I just sent her an email and asked her if she knew when she might accept requests again.

And she was really generous and gracious and offered another blogger that she knew who’s very experienced that I could possibly talk a little bit with even though she wasn’t accepting requests at that time, which was so nice and surprising that she would do that. She has a real successful blog. A couple other bloggers - 

Courtney:

What was the name of her blog again, Kristen’s blog? 

Anne:

Oh, sure. It’s Dine and Dish. 

Courtney:

Dine and Dish. Okay. 

Anne:

Right. 

Courtney:

Great. 

Anne:

And then, I also came across a blog, called EKat’s Kitchen. That’s E-K-A-T, apostrophe, S, EKat’s Kitchen, and that’s written by Erin. And she was very encouraging to me early on as well. We exchanged some emails and have kind of developed a little friendship online, and that’s been one of the benefits of blogging is the relationships and friendships you form with people that you’ve never even met. 

Courtney:

Yes, definitely. 

Anne:

And then, there’s been - since we’ve been planning the Christmas event, a couple of bloggers expressed a lot of interest in our event. And one of them actually is gonna co-host the event with us. Her name is Tricia, and she writes on the blog Recipe Roundup.

Her cousin, actually, Krista, writes the blog Everyday Mom’s Meals, and she is really good on Facebook to, I guess, help connect other [inaudible] in her network with newer bloggers. She’ll tag different blogs and ask her followers to check them out, and it really was after she - she and I crossed paths that our Facebook fan base started to grow a little bit more than it had been. I’m not as good at that kind of stuff. I have a lot to learn with building community. 

Courtney:

Yeah. 

Anne:

So there are a couple - I think you were asking if there were some bloggers that we look up to, and there are a couple of Christian bloggers that I definitely have come across and look up to a lot. One would be Kristen of We are That Family and she has a link-up on Wednesdays that I try to link recipes to periodically. And I really look up to her a lot because she has a ministry that she supports on her blog - I’m really not sure if she started it or not - called The Mercy House.

Then there would be two more, Women Living Well, by Courtney, who also has a ministry through her blog. I think she does a morning devotional, and she also has a Wednesday link-up that we try to link some recipes each week. And then, The Time-Warp Wife, by Darlene who is a published author and also does a Tuesday link-up. And she does a - she writes a lot about being a housewife and I guess like a Proverbs 31/Titus 2 type ministry or information.

And then, there was one more, actually, April of The 21st Century Housewife as well, which I guess that falls more under the - the faith question. 

Courtney:

Yeah. 

Anne:

I wrote a post recently featuring her blog as part of our link-up event that we do on Mondays. And part of her blog goes into her experiences with anorexia, and so I spotlighted that issue in her feature post. And it’s actually been a really popular post. We’ve gotten some traffic from Stumbled Upon through it, so I know that people are sharing it. And I think it’s a topic that’s important. 

Courtney:

Yeah. Great. I knew a lot of those bloggers. There are some I didn’t know, The Time-Warp Wife, you said? 

Anne:

Yes, Time-Warp - 

Courtney:

Yeah. I’ve never seen her page yet. I’ll have to go check her out. 

Anne:

Yeah. She has some really great information and content on her blog. She has a housekeeping schedule where she I guess kinda shows how you can divide housekeeping duties up to do a little something every day, focus on a different area of your house each day so you can kinda keep things under control instead of letting everything get crazy and then trying to do some major big cleaning one day. That’s one big feature that I think’s been pretty popular on her blog, and she just has a lot of really encouraging faith posts on her blog as well. 

Courtney:

I’ll go check her out. Okay. So what is your favorite blogging tool? 

Anne:

I think it would probably be the InLinkz that we use for the link-up that we have on Mondays and that bloggers use. I know there’s another linky - I believe that’s what it’s called - but anyway, we use - 

Courtney:

McLinky. 

Anne:

- InLinkz, and I really enjoy those link-ups. Because you just - there’s no - you know, there’s no end to the creativity and the ideas that you come across through those parties that people share from their blogs. We get a lot of traffic through those right now.

I guess being a new blog, you have to try to get out there somehow and when they’re on - those link-ups are on blogs that have existed for a little longer and they’ve built up a reader base, you’re able to reach out to some of those and share some of what you offer. And if they like what they see, I guess they’ll come back or follow your blog. 

Courtney:

Right. 

Anne:

So that’s probably my favorite one at this point. 

Courtney:

Gotcha. Cool. So how do you balance life and blogging? You said you have two kids, too? So how do you not let blogging take over, I guess? 

Anne:

Yes. We have two young children, one [inaudible] like I said, so I’m home with them during the day, thankfully. I’m blessed to be able to be home with them during the day. But I do work part time at night, so it is hard sometimes to balance it all.

And blogging can consume a lot of time. I’m not always very good at balancing it all. It’s definitely something I need to work on improving, but I guess my focus during the day - I like for my main focus during the day, really, to be my children and their needs and having those met first. If they are occupied or playing well together, which sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t - 

Courtney:

Yeah, I understand that. Okay. 

Anne:

Sorry? 

Courtney:

Oh, I thought you were gonna say something else. 

Anne:

Well, I was just gonna - you know, that yeah, during the day that that’s pretty much how it goes. And then, sometimes I’m able to blog - most of my blogging, I guess, I do in the evenings alternating with my - with the work that I do at home as well. And then, John can answer for himself. 

John:

Well, the biggest thing for me is with it being the Saturday evening type theme is that I do most of the work, per se, for the blog on Saturdays and Sundays. We do the weekly recipe post that’s on a monthly theme - like this month, the month of September, or was it August - it was the month of August that we were doing favorite childhood recipes for back-to-school - the cool thing is is that [inaudible] Saturdays basically cooking for the family anyway.

I do most of the - I do all of the cooking in the house. The way our family is structured is that I usually do cooking for the majority of the week on Sunday afternoons or on Saturday afternoons. And so I can just incorporate a recipe that I wanna showcase on the blog into our menu for that week. And then, if I’ve got a little spare time and am feeling up to it, I can experiment and play around with new recipes. And the kids and Anne and myself, we get to eat the results, which is cool. 

Courtney:

Yeah. 

John:

But the technical aspect of it, doing posts, I’ll do occasional posts that are non-recipe related, but I can probably count on one hand [inaudible]. The way we’ve got it set up is that I come up with the recipes or taking ideas and putting it into [inaudible] take form or take shape. And then, Anne usually takes over and does the technical posting and all the techy stuff that she does that I don’t understand. It works out well. 

Courtney:

Yeah, sounds like it. Sounds like y’all have got a good system going on, which is awesome. So do you have any advice for people who are just starting to blog or thinking about starting a blog? 

Anne:

Well, as new bloggers, we probably don’t have a lot of advice. We’re definitely still learning ourselves. But I’m a very detail-oriented person, sometimes probably a bit too much. And I did a lot of research in the beginning just trying to figure out the whole blogging thing and how to blog, the ins and outs of search engine optimization and Google page rank.  And I still don’t understand completely all of that stuff, but I would - I guess I would just say to learn - try to learn as much as you can about it so that you have the information you need to put into practice.

And I guess one of the things that I learned was the importance of building community. And even though it’s not a strength of mine, I know it is important and something that will help build readers and get people interested and involved on your blog. There are a lot of different ways to do that. One other, I guess, site that I came across was The SITS Girls community. 

Courtney:

Uh-huh. 

Anne:

[Crosstalk] [inaudible] - I guess you’re familiar with them. 

Courtney:

Yeah. 

Anne:

They feature a blogger each day, pretty much, and do roll calls on their website. And a lot of times, people who are on there reading the features, they’ll visit other bloggers who’ve roll called on there that day. That’s been a big way, I guess, of building community or interest.

And just - I guess just visiting other blogs that are similar to yours or in the same niche, I guess, as you’re in, whatever that may be or if there’s more than one, like for us, food blogs or faith blogs or I guess even family. I enjoy looking at craft blogs a lot, even though I’m not real crafty. I’d love to be more crafty.

But I know it’s important to leave comments when you visit other people’s blogs. You don’t always have the time to do that, but when you can to try to leave feedback for other bloggers because it’s always nice to get that yourself. And for me, I think one thing that I know I enjoy is when I get a comment that’s very genuine and they’ve really - it’s obvious that they read what you wrote and weren’t just leaving a comment for the sake of commenting.  

Courtney:

Right. Great. Well, is there anything else you want our listeners to know about you guys? 

John:

No, not particularly. 

Courtney:

No? We learned a lot about you guys, which is awesome. 

John:

We’re just simple people, nothing extraordinary. We’re just tickled to death, or I am tickled to death that we have the traffic that we have on our blog and that people are taking an interest in what we’re doing. It’s really - it’s very flattering. And we’re having a lot of fun with it. 

Courtney:

Okay. Well, I have another quick question, then. So what do you do to get your blog traffic? Did y’all do anything in particular or specific that helped gain traffic and visitors? 

Anne:

Well, you know, I don’t think our traffic is super high. I think that I don’t really have anything to compare it to. I don’t know how to measure how good our traffic is. I think it - as far as - I guess what I compare it to for now is where we were in January and where we are now, and we have seen what looks to be steady growth in traffic and interest in commenting and things like that.

I think that probably the first of our comments probably came through our - or my involvement with The SITS Girls because one of their main focuses is supporting other bloggers and leaving comments. So I think that’s where probably most of our first comments and participation and involvement came from. Facebook - my husband just said Facebook; we do get a lot of traffic through Facebook.

We - I think that the link parties, like I said, have also brought us a lot of traffic. I think just, really, just getting out there on other people’s blogs, checking out what other people are doing and as you kinda click through blog land or the blogosphere, as I call it, you’ll - you’ll come across just - there is just a wealth of information that every blogger has to offer, whether it’s from their own personal experiences or blog information that will help you as a blogger because they’ll have links to communities that they’re involved in.

And you can’t do it all. It’s impossible. So I think you just have to decide which ones - or where you wanna start or just start somewhere getting involved in the different communities and opportunities for that. And I - one of my concerns early on was gaining - or increasing Google page rank because I felt like that would be important as far as people being able to find us through searches online and things like that. And I know that for a long time, we had zero page rank, and then as time went on - I believe it was sometime in June that it went from a zero to a two. So that was really exciting. 

Courtney:

Yeah. 

Anne:

And from what I’ve read and what little that I understand about all of that, I know that, again, commenting is really important to help - or it’s just one thing you can do to help increase your page rank. There are other things that I think have to come together along with that as far as having good quality content on your blog, and from what I understand, the longer you blog, obviously, the more you’re gonna have. 

Courtney:

Right. 

Anne:

And if you focus on having good quality, original content, over the long-term that’s something that will [inaudible] long-term. But commenting is something you can do right away to help create links, backlinks, to your blog. 

Courtney:

Yeah. I agree. Well, I’m so glad y’all could join me tonight and just share with our readers about you guys and your blog journey. And I hope your blog continues to grow, and I wish y’all the best of luck with it all. 

Anne:

We really appreciate the opportunity to be on your podcast. 

Courtney:

Thanks.

If you are a Christian blogger, you can request to be a guest on a future Faithful Bloggers podcast here.  You also will see several additional opportunities that Courtney has for your blog to get exposure, as well as other great information to help you in your blogging journey, such as blogging prompts and some free resources.

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