My love/hate relationship with food blogs

I am a food blog addict. (Also a style blog addict, but that's another post.) I probably read about 20 food blogs a day, which I think is a lot for someone who isn't a food blogger herself (I do not have the camera skills nor the recipe inventing skills (yet) for that endeavor).

But I really have a love/hate relationship with these food blogs. What I love about them is easy:

• They inspire me to try new foods, new food combinations, and new cooking techniques
• They remind me to feed my family good foods
• They make me feel better about my skills when they write about how a recipe went wrong or took so many tries before it was good
• They constantly remind me that cooking is NOT hard (it's not!!!) - it just takes a small measure of patience, willingness to try and sometimes fail, and dedication to the fact (fact!) that it's better to cook and eat at home than eat or order out.

Here's what gets on my nerves about food blogs, though: the way they all seem to be seasonly in sync. I understand that cooking seasonly is important and I understand that each food blogger wants to give his or her take on a seasonal item or ingredient.

But like right now? If I see another pumpkin recipe, I'm going to retch. And it seems to always happen that just when I think, "Well, phew, that phase is over," another phase starts and I'm left going, "Oh god, everyone's doing that now?"

If you're a standard food blogger, here's pretty much how your year goes:

January: healthy meals (New Year's resolution time!), soup

February: cutesy Valentine's Day treats

March: St. Patrick's Day recipes (beer, soda bread, cabbage, etc)

April: Spring and Easter recipes (ham, spring side dishes)

May: Memorial Day barbecue recipes

June: more barbecue recipes

July: 4th of July red, white, and blue desserts, summer cocktails, MORE barbecue

August: more summer cocktails (it's getting super hot, after all) and, hey, look at that - more barbecue. Also, summer salads and other foods that don't require turning your stove on (did we all mention that it's hot outside?), anything with ice cream - or making ice cream itself (seriously, did we mention it's summer and it's hot outside?)

September: back to school snacks, lunchbox ideas, sandwiches, apple recipes

October: more apple recipes (we're still apple-picking!), soup, Halloween treats and everything possible with pumpkin

November: Thanksgiving (turkey, ham, potatoes, green bean dishes, rolls, pies), stews, Thanksgiving leftover meals

December: so... many... cookies... plus holiday dinners and cocktails (for New Years)

All year round: cookies (seriously, why are people so cookie obsessed?), chili

All of the sweet treat recipes and other little things like that are great when an occasion pops up that I need something like that, but that's really not often these days. What helps me best right now is normal dinner ideas - and, more specifically, dinners that can be eaten by a toddler with only burgeoning spoon and fork skills.

So all those soups I'm seeing every single day this month? Not so useful unless I want my dining room floor bathed in it. I do make hearty soups, stews, or chili for us sometimes, but I strain Nate's so he only gets the bigger bites. All that pureed soup? I'm pretty sure he'd think we all reverted to baby food and he'd probably be a bit peeved.

All that said, this is all a bit tongue-in-cheek, of course. I love food blogs and am mostly amused by the fact that on any given day I can open my Google Reader and find a dozen "new" recipes all within a certain seasonal theme. Food is a universal connector between human beings and so there's something to be said for the fact that we're all interested in cool dishes in the summer when it's hot out. There is a communal sense to all of those common-topic posts, for sure.

But really, I'm done with pumpkin right now. I have enough pumpkin-related recipes to last me until next October, when I'm sure I'll be greeted with a whole slew of new ones.

Here are a few of the food blogs I adore and read every day, even when they're posting the twenty-third soup recipe I've seen in three days:

Mel's Kitchen Cafe

How Sweet It Is

Smitten Kitchen

Joy the Baker

Shutterbean

The Pioneer Woman Cooks (of course!)

Like I said, I read many others but these are the ones I get the most excited about seeing a new post from - some because I love their recipes, some because I love their writing or stories, and some because I love their photography (and some for all of the above).

So, tell me, what food blogs do you absolutely adore and/or have had great success with trying recipes from?

P.S. As I was writing this post, I got a recipe email entitled, "Fill up with pumpkin!" All right, already, fine. I will go buy some canned pumpkin on the way home. Sheesh.