Think Culture Days is just for the singers, dancers and artists? Think again. All across the country, innovative food professionals will be sharing their skills, culinary passion and food heritage during Culture Days.

What is Culture Days?

Culture Days is a coast to coast to coast celebration of arts and culture which takes place every year in September. In 2011, Culture Days will take place on September 30, October 1 & 2. Culture Days will be prominently featured throughout Canada via a major national public relations and communications campaign.

Beyond public appreciation, Culture Days acts as the lynchpin in a vast, pan-Canadian network and movement to transform the way Canadians view and engage in the arts cultural life of their communities.

Not sure how you can fit in? Here are just a few of the food-related activities scheduled.

• Chef Demonstration
• Italian Pasta and Cookies
• Mussel Boil with Traditional Newfoundland Music
• Feeding An Army: 150 evolution of food rations (with samples)
• Cob Culture and Cooking

If you love food and want to share our culinary heritage, Culture Days could provide the exposure you need. Participation is free and the only requirement is your event take place at some time during the Culture Days time frame and be open to the public without charge.

Want to get involved? Click here for details. They have checklists, online help and an FAQ section to answer all your questions.

While the Culture Days media machine will promote your event widely via the web and print, we encourage any Cuisine Canada member hosting an activity to post a link in the comment section. We’d love to know what you’ve got planned.

Between Foodgawker, Tastespotting, Photograzing and This Is Why You’re Fat, you’d think there are more than enough food photo sites on the internet to satisfy everyone. But a recently launched food photo gallery has an added feature cookbook authors might like. With an emphasis “on recently published cookbooks and images associated with dishes made from those books”, CookbookKarma.com gives credit to the recipe source as well as the reviewing blogger.

Like other food photo galleries, the posts and food photos are submitted by the blogger, but the site automatically includes the cover for the book in question. Click on the cover’s thumbnail, and you’ll be taken to the cookbook’s page, which includes a picture of the cover, a description of the book and all related posts submitted to CookbookKarma.

The site is new and growing, so it’s hard to tell if this will become as big as its competitors, but CookbookKarma already has more than 12,000 cookbooks (from 2007 onward) in its database and hundreds of blog post submissions.

So what do you think? Is this just another site where bloggers provide free content? By aggregating the related posts is it giving away too much content? Or is this a much needed boost to the publishing industry?

With the layperson in mind, Eliot, who has extensive restaurant experience, teamed up with James P. Dewan, a chef and food writer and culinary instructor with no restaurant experience. Between the two they had the right blend of practical knowledge and communication skills. To ensure the right mix of information, Eliot wrote his colleagues, asking them what was missing or needed to be cut from their collection of knife skill books. He based the contents on their responses.

The result? The expected chapters on the different styles of knives, proper knife care, and safety measures, but also sections on mise en place, setting up a work staion and simple but important issues, like how to hand knife to someone. Nothing gets chopped until page 89 — then the content is encyclopedic, including creative garnishes.

BIGGEST CHALLENGE
Besides explaining the claw grip, a task that was handed to Dewan for his writing skills, photos were the biggest challenge. While Eliot knew the skills, his hands weren’t appropriate. They needed gender neutral hands with no freckles or scars — and what chef hasn’t a few scars? Because the person had to be able to perform the skills, they couldn’t simply hire a hand model. So Eliot turned to Facebook and had chefs send him photos of their hands. In the end, they found a working chef with unblemished, androgynous hands. Not only could this model perform the required skills, he helped hone the techniques, alerting Eliot to inefficiencies. In the end, the skills shown are practical as well as accurate.

PHOTOS
Since every reader learns differently, Eliot wanted to make the book highly visual, while giving as much written guidance as possible with the photos. The resulting book has 1200 photos in less than 400 pages of instruction.

To wrestle this mammoth task into submission, the book was photographed twice. Before the professional photographer arrived, Eliot and his team shot the skills from various angles to determine which worked best. Knowing the approach not only streamlined the photographer’s already daunting job, but made the final photo selection easier as they edited.

CONSTRUCTION
Because the book was going to be used in the kitchen, they chose a concealed wire-ring binding construction with a hard cover that would lie flat, but stand up to repeated use.

DID IT WORK?
According to the publisher, Robert Rose, the book has been strongly embraced by the consumer. During the Fall period it was a top-10 bestselling Robert Rose title at Chapters/Indigo.

It’s a new month. Fresh starts. New projects. Exciting news?

We’ll be posting the list of Canadian Culinary Book Award nominees soon. In the meantime, tell us what you’re up to this month — or even what you did last month. We’re flexible.

Cooking demonstrations, workshops, publications, book signings, media appearances, website news, product launches… we’re open to anything food related that involves our members. Just post a comment and after a brief delay for moderation, your news will go live.

Don’t be shy. We love hearing what our members are up to.

Photo © puuikibeach. Published under a Creative Commons License.

According to a recent MailChimp survey based on more than 9 BILLION emails, most of us read and answer work emails from home. If you’re a freelancer, as many food writers are, email alone threatens to eliminate the already blurry line between work and personal time. Add in smart phones, laptops and portable devices such as the iPad and you’re never really off the clock.

Not surprisingly, as technology burrows deeper into our lives, procrastination becomes more pervasive. According to Piers Steel, author of Procrastination Equation, chronic procrastination has increased fivefold in the past decade. Why? We’re already hardwired to respond to distraction, and never before have so many sources been so close at hand. Steel says “As you get closer to temptation, your desire for it peaks, allowing the temptation to trump later but better options.”

To make matters worse, after each tweet, update, email or web search, it takes a good 10 minutes to get back on track. The five minutes it takes you to check and respond to email actually robs you of a quarter hour of productivity.

If you’re not getting things done, Steel suggests you add some of these to your arsenal in the war against mass distraction.

• Apple Freedom: Block Internet on your Mac for up to 8 hours. This can be handy when you’re at the keyboard and on assignment.
• Put temptation out of reach: Erase video games, remove the battery from your PDA, unplug the TV. The amount of time it takes to get the following items working again just might outweigh your urge to delay.
• Schedule leisure time: People often work harder to deadlines. Knowing you’ll have a break at a specific time keeps your desire to peak at Facebook in check.
• Banish email notification: Simply disabling email alerts can make you 10% more efficient — over a year that’s a month of time saved. Instead of responding to the ping like Pavolv’s dog, check email at your convenience or during natural breaks in productivity.
• Single-Task: The best way to be more productive is to immerse your self in one task. While multitasking sounds productive, numerous studies show that it actually makes us far less efficient.
• Keep a tidy desk: Messy works places are distracting. Ironically, the most common procrastination activity is organizing your clutter. Tidying up your desk each night will make you more productive the next day.
• Designate separate work and play spaces: Do your non-work web surfing and social networking in a different place than where you work. If a home office makes this impossible, create a second computer profile with a different login, desktop and layout. Login to your work persona when you’re working and then switch to your play persona when you need to take a break. Steel says, “If you are not willing to take the minute required to log in and out, you don’t need the break.”
• Create a routine: Predictability and routine help you stay on focused and keep distractions at bay. If possible perform your daily tasks in same place at the same time of day.

How do you keep on task? Or have you fallen victim to distraction?

Photo © smlp.co.uk. Published under a Creative Commons License.

Wondering what the picture is of? It’s an example of the code Google now requires for their Recipe Search feature. If you think it looks scary, you’re not alone. When Dianne Jacobs wrote about the issue on Will Write for Food, more than 100 comments poured in. The curious may read about it here.

In brief, Google’s new recipe search function sent many food bloggers into a tailspin since they weren’t told about the new requirements until the function went live. Meanwhile, the big name sites were given a year’s head start. What’s the issue? No matter how diligent you were with SEO, without the proper code your recipes wouldn’t show up on the recipe search. And for a lot of bloggers being ignored costs money.

Fortunately, programmers have quickly created a couple of  WordPress plugins* that will code the recipes for you. They’re quick to install and extremely easy to use. The add only a couple of minutes to entering a blog post. Best of all, they’re both free.

• RecipeSEO: Once you’ve entered your recipe using the plugin, instead of inserting text, it inserts an image. When you post, readers see the recipe text you entered, but the embedded image ensures you don’t mistakenly delete any code. If you need to amend your recipe, you can make edits using the plugin. While you can’t muck up the code, you cannot customize the recipe’s format either.

• hRecipe, on the other hand, allows you to customize the code. It also has a few more fields than RecipeSEO, such as tagging specialized diets and ethnic cuisine. However, if you need to edit your recipe, you do so in the post itself and can inadvertently remove code.

So, which one to use? It’s a matter of personal preference. They both do the coding for you, which will help your recipes appear in the new Google Recipe Search.

We only know about these two WordPress plugins. If you know about more WordPress recipe plugins or similar solutions for other platforms, such as Blogger, TypePad and MoveableType, please, let us know.

*Note: one reader says these plugins aren’t available on WordPress.com sites, which are not self-hosted.

Pat Crocker, a long-time Cuisine Canada member, and cookbook author emailed with a question. “My friend, Dr. Arthur Tucker, a research professor at Delaware State University, specializing in the chemistry and identification of herbs and author of The Big Book of Herbs and others, recently asked me about Mignonette Pepper, of which I have no knowledge.” Pat is wondering if anyone in the Cuisine Canada community can help her out.

Here is the question (with permission from Art) :

For years our family has put mignonette pepper (whole coriander and black pepper) into our pepper mills. My heritage is almost entirely Pennsylfawnisch Deitsch (Pennsylvania German) except for my illiterate, drunken, syphilitic great-grandfather from Merton, Devonshire. (There’s a story…his real name was George Halls but he changed it to Tucker when naturalized in Wilkes-Barre, PA).

Anyway, I Googled mignonette pepper (not poivre mignonette, which is French coarsely ground black pepper), and ‘lo and behold, mignonette pepper is French Canadian. Now, my mother and father were voracious readers, and I remember that she used to buy the Toronto Star Weekly, later, 1968-1973, the Canadian Star Weekly at a little magazine store in Northampton, PA.  I think that this is where the mignonette pepper originated, as we have many fond recipes from that weekly, such as Chicken Maison (chicken, sausages, and vegetables in a clay cooker), and a lamb recipe studded with pine nuts and anchovies in a clay cooker (the anchovies dissolve to create a wonderful sauce). What do you know about the herbs and spices of the French Canadians?  Is there anything written about this?