Season’s Eatings

Hope your holidays were a blast! I’ll be writing about mine in a day or two. But first I wanted to make a big announcement.

Nobody got hitched and there are no buns in the oven, so relax there, pardners.

But I’ve teased you for awhile now with this top-secret project. Over there, to the left, a countdown has been…well, counting down. (That’s what they do, after all). Eat My Words. What the heck is that, you’re wondering. Well, lemme tell ya:

Eat My Words is a spinoff of Mark My Words. It is a yearlong food challenge Tara and I will be attempting together. A few years ago, I showed up for work one day, and there were pink boxes of doughnuts all over the office. “What a delightful surprise!” I said, while biting into a maple bar. “Happy National Doughnut Day!” a coworker replied.

Wait a second. There was a day dedicated to eating doughnuts? Who knew?!

Turns out every day of the year is dedicated to a certain food or beverage. These American food holidays cover everything from pecans to yorkshire pudding, prime rib to chocolate covered insects. I found this chart listing them all.

And I had an idea.

What if I celebrated an entire year’s worth of food holidays by eating the particular dish associated with each day? And what if I blogged about this as I went along? After all, it worked for Julie Powell, who turned “Julie v. Julia” into a successful book and movie.

It was too daunting of a task to accomplish myself, so I put the idea aside for a couple of years. And then Tara entered my life, and I had a willing companion to join me on my quest (although at first she merely encouraged me to do it, not realizing she would be a crucial key to success. She has since come around and decided to take part, as well).

So, on January 1st, we are kicking this project off. It’s an ambitious undertaking, and won’t be easy, but if we can make it through an entire year, we’ll have accomplished something really cool…and maybe we’ll attract attention.

We have launched a joint blog, Eat My Words. Feel free to click on it, link to it, bookmark it, subscribe to it, or whatever. We’ll be updating daily for one whole year and sharing photos, fun tidbits, a bit of food history, recipes, etc. – but most of all our reactions to each meal. The website is up and running, and it’s chock full of official rules and other cool stuff. On 1/1/13, we’ll begin writing there.

We also have a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. We’re pretty serious about this endeavor.

We’d love it if you’d follow along!