The dough hook

Step one was choosing a name, which proved to be an invaluable experience. On newspapers, editors and reporters assign stories a “slug,” the most shorthand description of the subject, and it is an exercise in distillation, reducing a tale to its essence. Deciding what the blog will actually be about is the same exercise; with luck you wind up with a name that crystallizes what you want to write about.

My instinctive first choice was cookedup, to reflect the manufactured nature of this blog, but it was already taken. After wasting half an hour flipping through a couple of books of food quotations, I realized any more than two words would be too many because they would be part of the URL with wordpress.com (so much for redbeansandricelyyours, Louis Armstrong’s great signoff to his letters). So I fished around in my “someday” mental file and thought of foodfake, for a professional writer creating a blog for theatrical effect. Down the line it may be useful for a “real” blog. . . .