Culinary Schools

I'm looking into culinary schools in Minnesota. The school doesn't have to be anything special or fancy, I'm thinking more or less a 2  year program within a community college. I want to know basic knife skills/technique, etc. I am so excited to start looking around & deciding where I want to live when I move to Minnesota. Does anyone have any ideas or know of a great school?

Adsense?

Is anyone familiar with Adsense? I filled out an application for Adsense back in the day for my Tumblr profile, but was denied. Now that I'm serious about making some cash through this blog, I'm not allowed because of my email address. Has anyone gone through the process of filling out the appeal form?

Web Series?

In what ways would I add a web series to this blog? What would you be interesting in seeing?
Here's what I thought of:

-Demonstrating a certain cooking skill and/or technique.

-Question & Answer portion (If there happens to be questions posted by followers)

-Progression of what I’ve learned in culinary school

-Interesting information that I’ve learned in culinary school

-Include a family member to assist with a certain recipe that I’ve previously blogged about or an upcoming blog post.

 

Intellectual Property Project for my class, Creative Writing for New Media

My intellectual property project will be a personal narrative told through a series of recipes that shaped my knowledge of food and how those particular recipes have been an inspiration for attending culinary school and eventually wanting to be a food critic. I am choosing to share my information through a personal narrative because I feel that I can highlight my own personal story in a positive manner considering my major is Creative Writing. Using the form of a personal narrative and posting these recipes on a blog site enhances my writing skills. Additionally, it helps me get accustomed to posting my own writing on the Internet and experiencing both positive and negative feedback.

            The recipes that I’m focusing on will start from the beginning of my culinary interests, from when I was little and helping out various family members in different houses throughout my childhood up to the sort of meals that I cook today in my own apartment. I plan to incorporate visual aids as well- pictures of my family members and I cooking and step-by-step pictures of how to prepare your food. Also, as the narrative progresses towards where I am today with my cooking skills and knowledge, I want to add some videos that my friends and I have made while experimenting in the kitchen with different recipes to lighten the mood of the blog with humor. Most of our inspirations for recording our cooking episodes were taken from the Food Network. My friends and I have admired a couple of the chefs for their strengths to come from the bottom to the top, Paula Deen in particular. We have watched almost every episode of her show, bought her books, and cooked from her cooking books. I’ve always said that some day I’d to like be a part of a cooking show or write for a cooking magazine-this blog seems like the appropriate push that I need to get started with my goals.

            Cooking and preparing meals brings people together, not just families.  Cooking and learning about food is a great stress reliever of mine and a great motivation to be as healthy as I can be, even in college. Being in the kitchen and learning how to nourish my body definitely shape who I am today and has made me admire those people in my life who took the time to teach me to cook and those people in my life who made the effort to stay healthy. I think that most young people these days don’t have the chance to have good kitchen experiences, so I’d like this blog to be something that they can read if they’re curious as to how to make something for an active and hectic lifestyle or something that reminds me them of a home cooked meal. With this blog, I’d like to be able to tell my own personal story, but I also hope that when people read this, they’ll be reminded of certain foods that take them back to a favorite memory or a favorite person in their life For instance, if they read a blog post about my trials and errors in making homemade macaroni and cheese with my best friend, it may prompt them to pick up the phone and get in touch with their friends. It may trigger a certain feeling they had towards that particular food I happen to be writing about.

            An example of a blog post will be capturing the times that my father used to let me help out in the kitchen, even at a very small age. The recipe will be baking chicken and using “Shake and Bake.” All the ingredients will be mentioned and how to prepare the meal, but additionally, I’ll use a flashback story to highlight how my dad taught me to really “shake up the chicken in the bag and to use all of my muscles.” If I can, I’ll include a picture of the two of us preparing that meal.

            I’m choosing to use Blogspot.com to broadcast my food blog. It’s a well-known blog site and easy to access.  I’d like to continue working on this after Creative Writing for New Media while in culinary school to track my progress with learning the simple skills needed for basic meals and cataloguing the information that I’m learning in school. I think it’s a great stepping-stone into the memoir I’ve been working on. I want to make this into something regular and profitable - Blogspot is easy to maintain and works well with both Google ads and Google analytics since it is a Google product. Also, not only does food bring people together, but people are always bonding and communicating on the Internet. Ads on pages with high traffic make bloggers profitable.  Additionally, Google analytics helps you to understand your readers.  It will show me what they're interested in, which posts are read most often, how people find my blog, how long they spend on my page, how many other pages on my blog they click through, what their location is, etc. This kind of information is beneficial for me knowing how to design my blog in order to be accessible and entertaining. Google will tailor to my blog and my reader so the types of ads I’m likely to get will be cookware and kitchen items.

            To promote this blog I’ll reach out to my close friends that I have shared cooking experiences with and to my family members who helped shaped my culinary interests over the years. I have an abundance of Twitter followers that I know are interested in cooking and some that work in the restaurant field, so I can spread the word through them as well. My goal is that this blog will be my own story told through special recipes and pictures, but that it also can be a learning and teaching purpose blog.