New Year, New Look

Maybe it’s just me, but I always think of 2010 as the year of the space odyssey. 2000 was surreal enough, but 2010 is really pushing the boundaries of ‘shouldn’t this be a sci-fi movie?’ to me.

So I have decided to push some boundaries of my own, and bring some really fundamental but out-there changes to the 30 Minute Dinner Party. There will be flash graphics. There will be searchable recipes with picture previews. All sorts of goodies to make the site more visual and accessible for all of you. With the help of my technically competent and stylistically discerning friends, we will soon be moving to a lovely and highly functional .com domain.

It is taking a lot of technical tweaking on the back-end to transfer all of the recipes and other content that you already know and love, so I am planning to launch the new site in February. You can get a sneak peak of the work in progress above, but please let me know if there are certain features in particular that you would like to see on the new site.

Some other exciting additions unfolding during this far-out year will be:

Weekly Recipe Round-ups

As I say in my “about the recipes” section, I only post recipes that I have made, tinkered with, and optimized, and know to be fast and delicious. Nothing makes it up here that I would not serve to guests over and over again because it is a proven winner. However, I often find great looking recipes that I would love to try, and though I don’t have the time to try everything I find, I wanted to share these great looking dishes with you all somehow. So I am launching weekly recipe round-ups of interesting recipes from around the web in hopes that you can try them at home. If you get a chance to make any of these dishes, please tell me what you think!

Definitive Dinner Party Planning Guide

When you have at least one dinner party a week, you notice some trends of what you need, what your guests need, what works, and what really doesn’t. In the past many months, I have been trying to hone the aspects of planning, preparation, and actual dinner partying that are most necessary for a successful soiree. These boiled down basics will be making their way into a series on the essentials of dinner party planning. So look forward to it, look out for it, and let me know: is there anything in particular you would like to see?

Recipe Source Highlight

Blogs, cookbooks, and websites like epicurious are gold mines of carefully chosen recipes, but there are so many out there, it can be difficult to navigate the fray. While I, like many others, am often guilty of using the Google machine to start my menu planning, you don’t always know what you will end up. As I described in my methods for getting over menu-planning mind freeze, a whole dinner can come together in you head just by leafing through an inspiration source, so I will share new and old favorite sources of meal planning brilliance with you here in the coming year.

Happy New Year!


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