There are four really exciting things that have happened here at startcooking.com which I am thrilled to be sharing with all of you!

1. startcooking.com has been named one of the six Best Food Blogs by Real Simple Magazine
   
2. I am now one of Federated Media’s new authors.
   (See below how you can win a free i-pod because of that.)
3. We have a new site design with many new features
4. Two of my videos (Chocolate Fudge Brownies and How to Juice a Lemon) have had over 2.6 million views on YouTube.com

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1. Real Simple Magazine

The March issue of Real Simple magazine has listed startcooking.com as one of the best Food blogs on the internet! I am in great company with:

• www.smittenkitchen.com
• www.ethicurean.com
• www.cupcakestakethecake.blogspot.com
• www.elise.com/recipes
• www.lastnightsdinner.net
• www.101cookbooks.com

In addition to the Food category, there are links to amazing sites in eight more categories:

1. Home
2. Organizing and Personal Productivity
3. Beauty
4. Fashion
5. Health and Fitness
6. Parenting and Family
7. Travel
8. News and Pop Culture

Thanks, Real Simple!

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2. Federated Media

Federated Media is going to be helping us support startcooking.com by connecting us with advertisers. I am so proud to be part of the Federated Media family.

John Battelle, Founder/Chairman/CEO of Federated is one of the all-time great internet geniuses and it is a dream come true to be working with him and his team! They are very serious about the level of quality that should be on the internet. (In fact three other of their authors have been named on Real Simple’s list as well! In Parenting: Cool Mom Picks and ParentHacks. And in Organizing and Personal Productivity: 43Folders.)

They want to find out a little bit about who visits startcooking.com. If you click up in the right corner of this page where it says “Tell us about you”, you will be taken to a very quick survey. Fill out the survey and be sure to leave your e-mail address, which will then qualify you to enter the contest to win a free i-pod! (And of course this i-pod will be pre-loaded with all startcooking videos, so you can use it to startcooking!)

And don’t worry about entering your email! The only reason we’re asking for it is so we can contact the winner. We promise we won’t use it for anything else.

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3. New Site Design

We have a new site design to provide all sorts of new bells and whistles for people visiting startcooking.com. I had a ball filming the new banner used in the introduction to the videos and partially shown on the top of the site! (The “o” made out of the avocado and the “g” made from a purple onion are definitely my favorite letters!)

We also have an amazing new index! The alphabetical listing as well as the category listings has been a huge hit so far. We will be adding a new category to Kitchen Basics called “Reference Charts” which will surely be a big help to everyone.

Two more really important aspects yet to be added to the site design are the “Word Search” and “Metric Conversion”. (I’m hoping Federated Media will find us someone who wants to sponsor that development!)

Adding the video to the blog page has helped to integrate the videos and the blog. There are many people who only ever saw the videos and were totally unaware of all the photo-tutorials on the blog side of the site!

I hope you are all enjoying startcooking’s new look!

*****

4. YouTube

This is by far the most unexpected event of all! Startcooking.com videos had already been on a number of video sharing sites (including Veoh, i-tunes, i-Food.tv, metacafe, graspr, mywaves.com and howstuffworks.com).

However, in the past two weeks, Chocolate Fudge Brownies and How to Juice a Lemon shot up to become the number one and two most view videos in the Education category on YouTube this month. They will most likely end up being ranked in the top five of All Time views in Education, ever!

As a result of this, there has been a gigantic spike in the viewings of all my videos. It is quite clear startcooking is filling a need. I would like to thank everyone for the tremendous support shown to startcooking.com. For me, it’s all a dream come true.

Cheers!

Kathy

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