By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

There’s been a synchronicity of bees around here this week. The other day, Kimberley and I were discussing the National Wildlife Federation’s June/July story about the importance of native pollinators (and that means bees!) when we saw something crawling on the floor in her office.

It was a bee. This little bee you see here, no longer than an eraser on a pencil.

We don’t know what kind of bee this is, but in the last 2 days, we’ve found 7 of them crawling around the imaging department (2 of them engaged in the activity that fulfills their half of The Birds & The Bees concept). We think they’re native bees, but we don’t know for sure.

Now, I’m no slouch when it comes to plant and animal identification. I love a good dichotomous key. But I have to admit, it was daunting to try to identify this little bee on The Bug Guide, a site that promises to help you identify insects, spiders, “and their kin.” Honestly, there are more kinds of bees on there than you’d find at an overturned Pepsi truck on the highway.

And that is exactly the point of the National Wildlife Federation’s story about native pollinators. It turns out that the numerous native bees of North America may be among the answers to the pollination woes brought about by the decline of the European honeybee. In California alone there are more than 1,600 known species of native bees, and there may be over 4,000 species of bees and wasps in North America. That’s a lot of pollinating possibilities. 

But our native pollinators are at risk as well, through habitat and forage loss, pesticide use, and other troubles brought about by bees living wing to elbow with humans (a species, as you may have noticed, that is not in decline).

There’s good news. You, the human, can help native pollinators, and it’s not as hard as you might think. The National Wildlife story has tips that range from reducing your use of pesticides to becoming a “messy” gardener by leaving patches of unmulched soil and brush piles that pollinators can use for nests. (I wholeheartedly endorse and practice that advice).

And you can plant a bee-friendly garden. I like Urban Bee Gardens, a website with a whole hive full of information about bees and the gardens they love, including plant lists. And definitely read “In the Key of Bee,” in BayNature, for more information about bee gardens.

Or branch out and plant a garden that will attract may different types of pollinators—like butterflies, moths, bats, and birds. Pollinator.org has some nifty downloadable guides tailored to specific areas of North America.

Bee gardens aren't just altruistic pursuits. Gardening to help pollinators will also help your garden, and you’ll reap the benefits with better yields of fruits and vegetables.

Happy bee gardening!

By Elaine Johnson, Sunset associate food editor

Photos by Kimberley Burch, Elaine Johnson, and Margo True

We have a tough job here. Really. Well, maybe not so tough. We just raised our glasses to the spring harvest with a beautiful lunch featuring our own produce, eggs, Chardonnay, beer, and honey. Team Kitchen did the cooking.

Test kitchen coordinator Stephanie Dean and recipe editor Amy Machnak put the finishing touches on the table. In front, you can see Grilled carrots and green onions with fresh thyme.

 

 

We started with Favas and ricotta on homemade wheat crackers and Radishes with fresh butter and sea salt.

Art director Jim McCann and test garden coordinator Johanna Silver try the crackers.

 

That’s me in the middle sampling the Sunset Chardonnay. It’s really mellowed from the crisp green-apple character it was showing last summer. Now it’s a lovely, full aromatic white. (In fact, wine editor Sara Schneider is scheming to slip it into our upcoming Western Wine Awards to see how it fares.) Photo director Yvonne Stender is on the right. She and Johanna (on the left) might be making faces about the beer. Still bad news, like Crayola crayons. Noble effort, though.

 

Managing editor Alan Phinney, associate garden editor Julie Chair (left), and Sara Jamison liked the wine, too.

We sat down to a table of pinks and greens. The Strawberry-honey lemonade (the pink drink in the glasses) was so refreshing. Plus, the color matched Johanna’s garden flowers.

The bulls-eye Chioggia beets looked stunning on the mesclun salad.

 

We also feasted on Spring greens quiche (made this time with spinach, but also delicious with sautéed fava leaves) and Grilled carrots and green onions with fresh thyme.

 

For dessert, another taste of spring: Fromage blanc with strawberries and lemon honey.

It’s incredibly satisfying to eat good food that you’ve raised and cooked yourself.

Here’s the recipe for the lemonade. We’ll try to catch you up on the rest of the recipes in Sunset or in a future blog. Happy spring!

Strawberry lemonade

MAKES About 2 quarts

1 qt. strawberries
¾ cup honey
1 cup fresh lemon juice (from 5 to 6 lemons)
Ice

Whirl strawberries and honey in a blender until puréed. Pour through a fine strainer set over a bowl, rubbing to extract liquid; discard seeds. Stir in lemon juice and 1 qt. water. Pour over glasses filled halfway with ice.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

Things are crazy in the test garden as we prepare for Celebration Weekend, but I wanted to take a quick minute to keep you posted on my ever growing interest in Team Escargot. Turns out Sunset wrote the book (er, article) on homemade escargot back in May of 1988. Check it out:

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Our little spring garden is ready for showtime--in other words, lunch.

Yesterday morning, Johanna got down on her heels in the garden (our spring crops are very short) and clipped mesclun and a whole mess of herbs, yanked up green onions, and pulled three colors of beets and some carrots and baby radishes for Team Kitchen to cook with. The crooked carrot, which you can see it in the basket above, got that way because it had to grow around a rock. That's why you want nice, loose, fluffy soil: so you can have nice, straight carrots.

Not pictured here: the favas (which got ripe all at once a few weeks ago, as they tend to do, and so had to be harvested) and the strawberries, regular and tiny Alpine, which are growing separately in planter boxes. There are bunches of herbs here, too, but they're hiding under the lettuce.

I sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of water for swishing and a knife for root-trimming, and chomped warm vegetables from the basket. Everything was sweet and juicy, especially--surprisingly--the green onions; they had only a hint of heat sneaking in toward the end of the chew. Even the over-large mesclun had managed not to get bitter or leathery, as overgrown lettuce is prone to do. And the chervil, although slightly scorched (it's a delicate little frilly herb) had a clean, good flavor, like a refreshing licorice candy.

The only disappointment was the Russian tarragon (Artemisia dracunculoides), which we accidentally planted instead of lovely and sophisticated French tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus)--they're really hard to tell apart. At first it tasted like nothing at all, and then it tasted like pine tar. Well, we just won't use it. Luckily we have plenty of other herbs to choose from.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

We've been furiously busy putting the finishing touches on the next issue of the magazine, so haven't had much bee time (except for the occasional stress-relieving short visit). But today we were finally able to go out to the bees.

They're doing so well.

Califia is filling her top bar hive admirably; she now has built perfect natural comb on 15 frames. We installed that package of bees a little over a month ago. It amazes me how fast they work.

After our scare over a broodless Veronica last month, we were delighted to find she now has three full frames of brood, and three more with brood, eggs, and honey. All in her top box; we hope the bottom super is just as full of baby bees.

Midge, daughter of swarmy Betty has plenty of brood, but—oh dear—she has five supercedure cells.  One of those cells houses cell a small pink baby queenbee curled in a puddle of royal jelly. We're a little worried. Will Midge be overthrown by a new queen? Is Midge ailing or injured? Or are the bees just being prepared for any contingency? We left the supercedure cells, figuring the bees know what to do. They're bees, afterall. 

Veronica and Midge are filling their honey supers (smaller boxes which they'll hopefully fill with honey we can harvest). We've gone out on an apiarist limb and didn't use the metal grill called a queen excluder that  keeps the queen out of the honey storage area. So far they've only put honey in the honey super, and no brood. Smart bees. 

Footnote

Bee slippers are not typical office wear at Sunset, but today I simply had to scuffle around in my new kicks, an early birthday gift from my department ("I saw them in the store window," said Marie Pence, systems manager, "and I knew Margaret had to have them.") Thanks so much to my co-workers; I love the slippers.  Kimberley is now coveting a pair of her own, and honestly, who wouldn't?

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

The cooks are putting the final touches on the menu, and I'm once again preparing to part with a garden that's all grown up.

Here's how the One Block spring menu has come to life:

The radishes are looking pretty wimpy. They're getting fried in this heat! We already enjoyed the first succession a few weeks ago. It's a bummer not to have them along with everything else, but that's sometimes how it goes in the garden.

All of the comments on the tarragon post were super helpful. It looks like I'm indeed growing the less tasty cousin of French tarragon -- Russian tarragon. I haven't exactly told the chefs just yet. Hmm...wonder how that will go over.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

I'm feeling ruffled. Jack Shafer, the increasingly cranky media critic over at Slate.com, wrote a column yesterday suggesting that raising backyard chickens is a bogus trend.

(Busting bogus trends is his thing—a point of pride.)

Shafer cited recent articles from newspapers around the country that he calls "all-feather, no-bone journalism," including pieces from The Oregonian, Arizona Republic, Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press, and the one that I suspect pushed him over the edge, in his hometown paper, the Washington Post.

Tragically, he did not mention this blog or my chicken-raising story from our April issue. (Even if he's calling us bogus, I'll take the link!)

The problem with his column, of course, is that it is itself bogus.

Selling chicks as fast as he can hatch them

This morning I called Bud Wood, who owns Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa.

Wood was quiet for a moment when I suggested that this backyard-chicken thing was just a puffed-up, fake media trend. "If it isn't a trend I don't know what we're selling," he said.

At Murray McMurray Hatchery (est. 1917), they raise 110 varieties of chickens, many rare and heritage, and they sell 100,000 chicks a month when they're incubating and shipping as many chicks as they can.

Which, I might add, includes every month this year since February.

"Last year and this year, we have been running at full capacity, and we still have a 4- to 6-week wait to fill an order," he told me. "Two or four years ago, we pretty much sold out every week but we weren't running at full capacity and we would sell out a week ahead of time. Now, we are running the incubators as full as we can keep them."

A few years ago, he would sell 100,000 chicks a month in March, April, and May; the rest of the year, he would hatch fewer chicks because he got fewer orders. Not this year. They've been selling 100,000 a month since February, and they're sold out through July.

Plus, over the past 10 years, the size of McMurray's orders of chicks has been steadily trending downward. (The minimum you can order there is 25, because when they ship chicks through the mail they have to keep each other warm.)

"We see our orders going smaller and smaller," Wood says. "I used to sell a lot of orders in 100 boxes. Now 75 percent of our orders are boxes of 25. Ten years ago, the average order was 45 or 50 birds."

Wood says that as order size has been shrinking, he's concurrently been hearing about his customers dividing their boxes of 25 between three or four people, leaving each of them with a handful—perfect for a backyard coop. 

Changing laws on behalf of a "bogus" trend?

Then there's the matter of cities all over the U.S. taking up the issue of backyard chickens. Last summer, my go-to online chicken community, BackyardChickens.com, started a forum for people to discuss local chicken laws and how to change them. 

Ahead-of-the-trend college town Madison, WI, was an early-adopter; their city council changed the law to allow backyard hens in 2004. Ann Arbor, MI, began allowing them in June 2008. Fort Collins's city council voted to allow them last fall. Currently, Provo, UT is in the process of working through changing its law. In Salem, OR, Columbia, MO, and Knoxville, TN, citizens are lobbying for similar changes in city code.

Weird, all that political action on behalf of a fake trend.

Maybe the chicken advocates in those cities are only speaking in front of their city councils and boards of health for the benefit of lazy, bogus-trend-writing newspaper journalists?

This trend is too old? Thus it is not a trend?

The least convincing part of Shafer's column is the way his argument makes a last-minute U-turn in the third-from-last paragraph:

If backyard hen keeping is indeed a trend, it constitutes such a long-standing trend that it has ceased to be one. On March 29, 2002, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece about the "McMansion" coops some chicken owners were building for their birds. The April 5, 2004, Arizona Daily Star noted the high attendance drawn by Kim Fox at her chicken-raising speeches in Tucson... The Sept. 14, 2003, Seattle Times explored the world of the city's backyard chicken farmers. In the summer of 2003, both USA Today and Newsday profiled the author of Keep Chickens! Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs, and Other Small Spaces. "We sold 2,000 laying hens last year," the owner of a downtown Houston feed store told the Houston Chronicle for its March 30, 1993, edition. Dialing the Nexis machine back even earlier, we find a syndicated Martha Stewart piece in the April 23, 1986, San Diego Union-Tribune oddly titled "Home-Grown Eggs—Can't Beat 'Em."

Hang on here a second. I don't think that any of this spring's rash of chicken articles (mine included) is suggesting that we have invented the idea of raising chickens in backyards. Heck, I wrote about chickens for the first time in summer of 2006.

I don't understand: The fact that people have been raising chickens in their backyards before doesn't mean that there isn't more interest in it now, right? What's bogus about a long-simmering trend? This argument garners a FAIL from me.

Because here's the thing: I've been involved in this backyard chicken thing for a while now. We got our hens in August 2007, and at that time, I was a leeetle bit freaked out about being responsible for the ladies. I mean, what did I know about chickens? So I Googled. A lot. I devoured other people's anecdotes, searched for ideas to make our chickens happier, pored over accounts of chickens' favorite snacks and foodstuffs that would make them sick. I lurked on the BackyardChickens.com forum for days and weeks. 

There's much, much more being written about backyard chickens on the Internet these days than even two years ago. They're on blogs everywhere, there are classes popping up in far corners of the West, plus coop tours in places like Salt Lake City (June 27, peeps) and Tucson (May 23) and Fort Collins (it was April 18). Even forward-thinking Portland's Tour de Coops, after which most of the city tours are modeled, is only 6 years old. It's not that they were always there and I just wasn't looking; trust me, I was looking. It's that the chicken thing is catching on.

And Jack Shafer, that old rooster, can go crow about something else.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Just another day with Sunset’s Team Bee. Kimberley Burch, our team’s queen bee, bottles an unexpected honey harvest. We pulled a few frames from Midge, and bottled 32 3 oz. bottles (and ate a fair amount before bottling). Since one frame had enough honey to fill 22 bottles, I guess we ate more than a fair amount. It was delicious—light and fragrant

The girls seem to be doing well. Veronica has a tiny spot of brood of her own, some eggs that may or may not work out (we didn’t see them in the frame—my bad old eyes, I’m afraid, couldn’t pick out the tiny tiny eggs in the cells—and so we hung it from the side of the hive on the frame stand. Maybe too long.) We replaced one of Veronica’s honey-laden frames with a frame of brood and some nurse bees from Midge (who has a good amount of brood).

Califia is steadily filling her top bar hive with comb. Every day at about 4 p.m. there are young bees making orientation flights in front of the hive, flying zig zags as they scope out their surroundings before taking off on foraging trips.

By Margo True,  Food Editor

 

   

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Ok, I admit that Minnesota is out of Sunset's coverage range of the Western United States (although Minnesota—correction:a part of Minnesota— is west of the Mississippi). But when I found that one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman (Coraline, Anansi Boys, and the Sandman series), kept bees on his rural property outside the Twin Cities, I had to find out more.

It turns out that although he is a supreme weaver of tales, and while he does attend to the hives when he has time, Neil is not the Big Bee Boss. Sharon Stiteler, birder and beekeeper, is the lady in charge.

Sharon says she always wanted to keep bees, but until very recently, beehives weren’t allowed in Minneapolis.

“One day we were visiting with Neil, and he mentioned he was thinking about getting bees to pollinate his fruit trees. I said, ‘I always wanted to keep bees. But my husband said ‘Oh no you’re not.’ ”

Her husband mentioned that she was busy. Neil was busy. And if Neil was away at a book signing and Sharon away a birding event, who would be stuck taking care of the bees? The husband.

Neil’s assistant chimed in saying keeping bees wasn’t in her job description.

Sharon laughs when she finishes this story. “Now they’re my biggest helpers.” She finds that people love to visit the hives. “When they’re in a bee suit, it’s like they’re in their own little fortress of solitude.”

Sharon's been a beekeeper for 3 years. "When I first started bee keeping, I realized that if you ask 5 beekeepers a question, you'd get 5 answers." One day she was having a discussion with Neil about the hives, and she suddenly realized, "We must be real beekeepers now. We're arguing about methods."

The Gaiman beeyard is planned to grow to 7 Langstroth hives strong this year, with 4 hives of Minnesota hyegenic Italians and 3 hives of Russians. Why Russians? “We read that Russians have varroa mite resistance. And they also do better in long, cold winters.” 

Sharon has a very cool video on her blog, Birdchick.com of hiving their bees. You can see how the bees pour out of the box.  Having just hived a package of bees, I can attest to how easily the bees flow into their new home.

I'm curious. Any readers from cold places like Alaska been trying Russians?

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Last Sunday, Erika Ehmsen, Johanna Silver, Amy Machnak, and I sat in a darkened theater at the Millennium Broadway Hotel, nerves tingling. As some of you know, we'd been nominated—along with fellow one-block-diet bloggers Elizabeth Jardina, Rick LaFrentz, and Margaret Sloan—for a James Beard Journalism award.

Since we were sitting at a table near the exit sign, way way at the back, I was sure we wouldn't win. After all, no one would put us here if we were actually meant to get to the stage in any reasonable amount of time. I gently suggested that everyone just relax and enjoy dinner and give up the dream of winning an award.

So we did, and got to know our tablemates—fellow nominee Hank Shaw; his wife, Holly; and his lovely mother--all come from Sacramento. Hank writes a very entertaining, knowledgeable, pull-no-punches blog called Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. Like us, he's trying to show how possible it is for you to make your own food — from scratch. He tends to hunt and forage, we tend to garden and make wine, but the intention is very much the same. We felt glad to be sharing our table with a kindred spirit.

Then Kelly Choi, announcing the winners for the award ahead of ours (for Audio Webcast or Radio Show), accidentally opened the wrong envelope. "Erika Ehmsen, Elizabeth..." Oh, my lord. She'd flubbed, but we knew we'd won. Whoever got the Audio Webcast award, well, sorry, dude, our screaming completely drowned out your moment. Then we ran to the stage. (Ok, Erika walked. She's pregnant and wise.)

Hank Shaw's mother very kindly took this picture of us accepting our award:

 

Left to right: Johanna, me, Amy, and Erika, beside ourselves with joy.

And moments later, in the lobby:

Courtesy Hanna Lee

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur. Some very fine journalists won awards, including the multiple James-Beard award winner Alan Richman, of GQ magazine, and we cheered them all. For the full list, click here. Erika, bless her, was Tweeting like mad the entire time.

The next night, we put on our fanciest duds and went to the chef awards, at Lincoln Center. What a scene. We were quietly ushered around the red carpet, ah well. Amy's shoes deserved to have a prance before the papparazzi!

Amy's shoes. Actually, she had to mince, not prance.

The awards ceremony, which this year honored Women in Food, lasted three and a half hours, and although many deserving (and terrific) chefs won (including San Francisco's Nate Appleman and Maria Hines of Seattle), we were as famished as wolves by the time it was over. We dashed out and devoured tidbits put out by some of the top female chefs in the country (my favorite: Anita Lo's steak tartare with anchovy broth).

It was Quite a Scene. Besides the best and most celebrated chefs in the country, we spotted Salman Rushdie (we unabashedly had our pictures taken with him, on a camera that, alas, was lost at JFK).

Amy, Johanna, and me in the thick of it.                                   Top Chef Jeff McInnis and Erika.              

We had a very, very good time, piling happily into taxis for an after-party at Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton's tiny, excellent, jewel of a restaurant down in the East Village. (She'd been nominated for Best Chef New York City.) Gabrielle makes the best hamburgers EVER, intensely flavorful and so juicy they squirt.

I remember the clock saying 3:30 when I closed my eyes.

--------

Now, back we are at Sunset with all of us winners together, in front of the crazy-tall hops that we'll be using in an upcoming batch of beer:

Left to right, Sunset's Beard-winning bloggers: Elizabeth Jardina (with Honey), Rick LaFrentz, Amy Machnak, me (with Ophelia), Johanna Silver, Margaret Sloan, and Erika Ehmsen.

and because they were part of it too...the very patient Honey and Ophelia, representing the coop:

:

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

I'm back from the James Beard weekend extravaganza in NYC and am completely invigorated and inspired. We noshed on an incredible array of goodies after the Monday night awards, and it got me thinking about how to push the envelope on what we produce in the test garden.

Esquire took on this question last summer and it seems entirely possible to turn regular garden snails into fancy escargot so long as you purge them for several weeks to get whatever nastiness they've eaten out of their systems.

It seems like something fun to try, especially considering that they usually end up looking like this:

Yes, I know I can feed them to the chickens. Sometimes the sole of my boot just gets the best of me.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

I mentioned in my last post that I was concerned that the tarragon I seeded wasn't actually tarragon. I'm still very confused.

This is tarragon:

This is what's growing from the tarragon seeds I planted (bordered by dill above and parsley to the right):

Here is a shot of the container next to my seeds. The plants are definitely not identical but also aren't so completely different from one another:

Look at the leaves side by side (store bought plant is on bottom):

See what I mean? Is it or isn't it tarragon? The one I'm growing is much lighter and a bit less fleshier than the plant from the nursery.

A taste test has also been somewhat inconclusive. I asked recipe editor, Amy Machnak, to chew on a few leaves I plucked from the plants I grew without telling her what she was eating. She (very trustingly) munched away and said she was getting hints of "tarragon, spinach, and arugula." OK, so it seems that these plants are more tarragon that anything else, but I'm perplexed at their lack of delicious tarragon flavor and their odd appearance. Did I buy bad seeds? Is it something in their growing conditions? Has anything like this ever happened to you, dear gardeners?

By Sheila Schmitz, online editor, Sunset.com

Our sun hats are off to Sunset bloggers Erika Ehmsen, Elizabeth Jardina, Rick LaFrentz, Amy Machnak, Johanna Silver, Margaret Sloan, and Margo True, recipients of the 2009 James Beard Award in the food blog category!

The project highlighted the satisfactions, surprises (and worries) of producing one's own food. Our team raised hens, kept bees, made wine, grew food, feasted well, and showed how you can too.

Deemed “the Oscars of the food world,” by Time magazine, The James Beard Foundation Awards are the country’s most coveted honor for chefs; food and beverage professionals; broadcast media, journalists, and authors working on food; and restaurant architects and designers.

Will we be able to keep them down on the farm?

See all the nominees

Read about our One-block feast

Follow them on Twitter

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Happy May Day!

Our bees are doing well. Veronica, who was broodless last week, is following directions and has been laying eggs in the empty frames we placed in her hive. Kimberley wrote on the empty frames “put brood here,” so evidently bees can read. We know bees are smart, but we didn’t know they could read English.

Califia’s top bar hive doing well. It’s amazing how fast they’re building out natural comb. There are 15 bars on the hive now, and 14 of the bars are sporting comb with capped brood and honey.

Brianne inspects Califia's top bar hive

Top bar hives are marvelously easy to inspect. The top bars are simply strips of wood (no frames, no foundation) to which the bees attach their comb. The bars lie across the top of the box with no spaces between them; we only remove one or two bars at a time to look inside the hive (easy on the back), so most of the bees are still in darkness under the remaining top bars. We use barely any smoke, the girls stay calm, and everyone is happy.

These bees are watching us, but they're not attacking.

And the most captivating thing about Califia’s top bar hive? We can look through the observation window in the side and see what’s going on without disturbing the bees. It’s addicting, and I find myself in the bee yard whenever I have a spare moment, watching the bees inside the hive as they go about their business.

Looking through the observation window

We built our hive from two plans we found on the internet.
For the body of the hive, we used a plan from How to Build a Top Bar Hive offered for free by J.P. Chandler, author of the The Barefoot Beekeeper. To build the window, we used plans (also free) from BackYardHive.com

If you’re not handy, or don’t have, as we did, a resident carpenter available to build it for you, (A big thanks to Dan Strack!) you can purchase beautiful prebuilt hives from BackYardHive.com. I’m coveting one of their graceful top bar hive tools.  

Oh, well. I've said my white rabbits (it's the first day of the month). Perhaps I'll have the good luck to get one of these tools.

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

We’re looking over a four-leaf clover that Chicago’s French Pastry School sent to wish us luck at this Sunday’s James Beard Foundation Awards. (Thanks, guys!) Four of us are headed to New York for the ceremony, and we’re excited and nervous—and not just about what to wear!

Our One-Block project is in great company in the Best Food Blog category: Our fellow nominees are Bon Appétit columnist Andrew Knowlton’s The BA Foodist and Sacramento omnivore Hank Shaw’s Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, which takes locavore to a near-complete DIY level. We’re looking forward to swapping stories with Shaw, Knowlton, and all of the other food and wine writers we’ll be meeting this weekend.

Want to hear who we’re talking to and find out if we win? We’ll be posting live updates from the Media Awards ceremony on Sunset’s Twitter page. Sign up to follow us by clicking here—it’s free, easy, fun, and admittedly a bit addictive. Wish us luck, and see you on the Interweb!