Honored and Blushing in Food Blog Land

Kate has now unveiled the complete results of the 2004 Food Blog Awards and well, I am the lucky recipient of four awards: Best Writing, Best Recipes, Best Site Design and Best Overall Food Blog. Wow. I am thrilled to pieces, incredibly flattered, and just generally extatic. And grateful.

I remember very clearly the night when I decided to create my food blog, during a conversation with Maxence at a Japanese restaurant. I had been thinking about it for a while, wanting to follow in the footsteps of my favorite bloggers (they know who they are), but I was hesitant because I thought it may be too time-consuming and I was afraid I would quickly run out of things to write about. It turns out I got the first part right (oh the endless hours spent grooming and maintaining and caring for this blog!), but thankfully I don't see the second one happening anytime soon: food seems to be a bottomless source of renewable energy and inspiration, and I generally have way more things to write about that time to do so.

So I came up with a name (during a private brainstorming session on a bus -- and how I wish I had kept the paper on which I scribbled down the options!), I set up the blog on our home server, and started posting away. Little by little, to my great surprise and delight, the traffic grew, as the number of kind emails and media mentions.

I can honestly say, however lyrical this may sound, that Chocolate & Zucchini has changed my life. It has revealed myself to myself, it's given me an outlet for my passion and my creativity, it's allowed me to reach out to other people all over the globe who share this irrational, uncontainable, wacky love of all things food. It's created more opportunities that I would ever have thought remotely possible, and it's brought me a few really good friends. And here I am now, sixteen months, 427 posts and four food blog awards later: I've never been so happy, or so excited about what tomorrow will bring (well except maybe on Christmas Eve when I was little).

Acceptance speeches usually end with a list of thanks, so I'll gladly comply: first and foremost I would like to thank Maxence, for his love, his appetite, his infinite wisdom, and his server admin skills. Then come my family and friends, who have always been incredibly supportive and admirative, and who are so genuinely and touchingly happy when I am.

And of course, I would like to thank you -- for visiting Chocolate & Zucchini, for stepping into my little world, liking it here, telling me so, and making me feel like a million chocolate chips.

Oh, and do visit my co-nominees, tell them I said hi and congrats! There's Pim, Debra, Molly, Renee, Mik, Elise, Rachael and Johanna, Heidi, Martine, Josh, Raging Yogurt (whose real name I have failed to locate, but raging yogurt is cool enough), Graham and last but certainly not least, Adam.