The cooking blog Spoon Fork Bacon was a finalist in Saveur’s Best Food Blogs of 2013; however, it is a uniquely different food blog. The twist on the Spoon Fork Bacon blog comes in how the bloggers portray themselves. Many blogs about recipes will get right into cooking, because that is what we are expecting. This blog, which is authored by Teri Lyn Fisher and Jenny Park, is much more personal. The day I visited this blog, the opening paragraph on the front page spoke about how the blogger had just recently turned 30.
Now, this isn’t too unusual for a blog to include information about the authors; however, the means in which it is portrayed is different. The blog has a feel more around having fun than learning to cook. Before, cookbooks were a simple step by step process. This blog offers a more narrative style teaching, that honestly feels confused about it’s identity. The site itself is a contributor to the Kitchen Daily site, part of Aol, a news source. Both of these sites are well put together, easy to navigate and professional looking, unlike parts of Spoon Fork Bacon. Some pages are easy to read and navigate, just ignore the random crumbs. Other pages are less pleasing to look at with a large paragraph of categories and then pictures of those categories after the paragraph.
Spoon Fork Bacon could be the future of the online recipe guides. Having been chosen as a finalist for one of the best cooking blogs, and being supported in part by larger entities, suggests that a good portion of readers enjoy the less formal approach to learning to cook. From the quirky About page with appearing and disappearing dots, to the fun narratives by the authors, this blog calls for a reexamination of why users come to these sites. Visiting the blog and getting the recipe may now be considered part of the experience of cooking for the users.