Orangette will charm you into having another stick of butter with that.
When I first spoke with Molly Wizenberg, I told her that her voice sounded exactly as I’d imagined. Yeah, I know…it was pretty creepy of me. But anyone familiar with Orangette, her Seattle-based food blog, probably knows what I mean. Molly’s voice is soft and feminine, graceful and genuinely open. A lot like her writing.
Just be careful when you read Orangette. After one round it’s possible that your skinny jeans won’t fit and your cholesterol with shoot up 30 points. This girl can seriously rock a food description.
…I like nothing so much as a Dutch baby pancake, hot and puffy from the skillet, on a Sunday morning… the pancake rising like a bowl-shaped soufflé out of its foaming, sizzling pool of butter…Jimmy pulled the two tall, golden, bedheaded puffs from the oven, sprinkled them with freshly squeezed lemon juice, and dusted them with powdered sugar.
(9 am Sunday: butter and babies, February 27, 2005)
It’s ok. A keyboard can handle a little drool. Trust me, I know.
Orangette doesn’t just throw up a recipe with a set of do’s and don’ts or offer funny anecdotes about her culinary misadventures. Oh no, no, no. Molly writes prose, complete with vivid metaphors and tidy conclusions. Like a gracious hostess she creates a comfortable environment, placing each story in front of you like an amuse bouche, then following it with a recipe and a yummy photo. All you gotta do is relax and enjoy.
It all started when she was working towards a PhD in anthropolgy in Paris. It was shortly after her father passed away and she was at a crossroads in her life. I gotta hand it to her, Paris is a pret-ty good place to be at a crossroads, no? She realized that exploring France with friends, eating good food and drinking champagne was a lot more fun than her research. I’m thinking this conclusion took her about, oh, 3 seconds to deduce. So she decided she was going to leave her program.
At the advice of a journalist friend, she thought about starting a food blog. On July 29, 2004, days after returning from Paris, Orangette was born.
It didn’t take long for people to notice. Now she gets almost 2,000 hits a day. Her comments section always reaches double, sometimes triple digits. She won “2005 Best Overall Food Blog” from a reader-based award show. Once she even received a marriage proposal. At first she thought it was a joke and corresponded with the guy. “…then I realized he might be a little serious.” It was around the same time she started corresponding with Brandon, who later became her fiancé. “At the time I told my friends I had dueling suitors,” she laughs.
Despite her very feminine voice, Molly isn’t pure and dainty. There were cases of, shall we say, overexposure on Orangette. Like when she thought it would be funny to post some pictures of baked goods that ending up looking like, “genitalia with Elephantitis.” Her sister suggested she take them down, since they weren’t something the food writers Molly was trying to emulate would probably post. “At first I was pissed…but I realized she may have a point.”
She admits to not always having a loving relationship with food. We talk about the prevalence of eating disorders among women of our ilk, (white, upper middle class, college educated, and oh yeah, female.) “My mom is a Pilates instructor, so I was always health conscious,” she says, “I was never anorexic, but at the end of high school and in early college, I had very restricted eating habits and deprived myself of a lot of good things.”
A few months as an overseas student in France changed all that. “I had to eat what my host family gave me…and it was so delicious!” Afterwards she learned to let go and enjoy good food. She’s still slim, but between her “healthy cravings” and eating dessert every night, she’s managed to strike a balance.
She’s also learned to maintain equilibrium between her personal life and how much she blogs about it. This lesson came after she posted about a break-up in 2004. She went back and read it and thought, “Oh my god… this is like Dear Diary. Let’s get it off!”
I ask about what she thinks makes a good food blog good and she answers quickly, enthusiastically, “It’s not about the food!” Really? “What I love is when I learn something about who (the bloggers) are, when they tell me something new about themselves…. and show me their imperfections.”
“I never want people to think I’m too perfect.” she said. And she’s certainly not. That would be annoying. But with a wedding set for next July, a book proposal in the works and a fan base that keeps growing, things are pretty darn good for Orangette today.
If you want to make a kickass autumn salad, read last Monday’s entry on the fennel salad at orangette.blogspot.com. I made it this weekend and it’s a winner.