Pull up your chairs, kiddies, and let me tell you of a time long ago when you could make your name by starting a food blog. Daniel Shumski, who was also for part of this time a digital editor at the Tribune, did that twice—first by starting a thoughtful blog called Fruit Slinger, chronicling his experiences working for a certain farmer/vendor at the Green City Market (let’s just say he grew the blog from a seedling), which for a time occupied space here at the Reader. And then he had one called Waffleizer, a much cheekier, sort of David Letterman-humor one about all the things you could waffle in a waffle iron.
And now you have to find another project.
Here’s the question I never thought to ask before—what wouldn’t waffle?
The blog was a lot of fun, that part I liked a lot, doing the collaborations with other people. The thing that was hardest about the blog was maybe the thing that’s hardest about all blogs, which is that at the end of the day, it’s just you. And you’ve got to be the one pushing it forward constantly. Fortunately, I told myself at the beginning that there were only going to be 30 recipes on the blog, so there was at least a limit to that.
What was the biggest discovery in the process of writing the book?
You’re not far off! I’ve got a heart-shaped waffle iron, square one, round one, Belgian, non-Belgian—and then, like I said, it’s not just what I had but what other people have too. There’s a practically unlimited number of waffle irons out there and I have only six. Only six. A mere six. So I wanted to feel good about knowing that they worked in other machines, too.
