Great cooks know that sharing food together is one of the best community building activities you can do. So for food bloggers it’s only natural that you should seek out conversations and relationship in places where you can share your recipes with others. In this episode of Great Cooks Radio, Jill and I talk about how to use Twitter to build relationship and promote your blog at the same time.

We would love to hear your ideas about this topic. Follow us on Twitter and let’s continue the conversation. You can find us on Twitter using JillMcKeever or CharlesMcKeever

In the next episode we’ll talk about using StumbleUpon to promote your blog, so be sure to check out that show too.

Show Notes:

Be sure to check out Ben Herrera’s blog, What’s Cooking. Ben used eBay to research photography and lighting solutions. He does a great job with all his photography and he didn’t have to spend a lot of money to get a nice setup for taking his photos.

Also, be sure to check out the Great Cooks Blogroll to find more great food blogs. Signup to be included in the Great Cooks Twitter feed. Or you can follow Great Cooks on Twitter to stay on top of what’s happening with all the Great Cooks Blogroll Member Blogs.

Marks LOVES chocolate and baking and we are so fortunate that he loves to blog, too. With years of experience and a spirit full of passion and determination, Mark showed me that when you love something enough, nothing can hold you back from enjoying the blessings that come from it.

Now, for your listening pleasure…

A self taught food writer with a knack for cooking up delicious recipes, of course.

Katie is a delightful person with a heart for family and entertaining her friends.  She not afraid to try new recipes, either.

Listen in for more about Katie from One Little Corner of the World.

I had the great pleasure of meeting and talking with Susan from Operation Baking Gals. Susan told me the story of how she asked a few of her food blogging friends to help her bake some cookies for her cousin in Iraq. Today, she’s handling over 200 bakers and 6 Host Teams that are sending a taste of home out to our brave men and women serving over seas.

It’s a wonderful story, and Susan is a great gal to get to know. While you’re listening or after you catch the show, go over and meet the teams and the soldiers on Operation Baking Gals. If you have the opportunity then please don your baking mitts and join the fun.

Listen in and enjoy here.

Today, Ben gives us the inside scoop on what’s going on in and around the food blogosphere. This man is a Food Events Guru!

Listen here and ENJOY the show!

Listen here for the winners.

Read the full interview

Jill
Hello this is Jill from Simpledailyrecipes.com. How are you doing? I
have got to share with you my expeirence I had the other day at the
grocery store. I know, it wasn’t just any old grocery store though,
it was one of those foody grocery stores that’s got everything from
all over the world. Well I’d never been in this one before and I found
myself standing in their cheese section. And I’ve never seen so much
cheese in all my life, I was completely overwhelmed. I didn’t know
which way to turn, right or left or go forward.

And this man came up to me.

Now I can’t tell you his real name so I’m gonna call him Mr. Fromage.
And Mr. Fromage asked if he could help me and I said, “Well yes.”
So we got to chatting about cheese and I asked him his top 5 favorite
cheeses. And boy the information that fell out of this guy’s mouth
was fantastic, and my girlfriend Kim nudges me in the side and she says,
“It’s too bad we’re not recording all this.” And I thought,
oh well we can. So I did. So listen in, I asked Mr. Fromage where do
I start. Where do I even get started here.

I wanted to know, I went into
a grocery store and I’m in front of all these cheeses from all over
the world. What am I going to buy first? How do I even know what I should
get, what’s good, what goes on the basic cheese board maybe?

Mr. Fromage
On the basic cheese board you would want something, your texture is
important, color is important, flavor is important, and you’re gonna
want to try to please people who have different tastes. You need to
please the people who are afraid of cheese or who are not very educated
about cheese and then people who like the stronger, the stinkier. People
who have traveled and like things that are unusual or just the adventurous.
I would always choose for color, so I would choose maybe something yellow
or something colored in another way. I would choose probably a goat
cheese because there’s some people who do not do cow’s milk. I would
do a hard cheese such as a cheese that’s hard in the way that parmesan
is hard, but I probably wouldn’t choose parmesan. I might choose piave
because it has a finer texture.

I would choose something very
soft in the way that havarti cheese is soft but to have a more gourmet
feel to it I would choose something like doux de montagne because it
is soft in that way but has a pretty round rine, so again we’re going
with color. It’s okay I think on the cheese board to have cheeses
that have things included in them like chai or truffle. We just tried
the fotogenetic that has the truffle in the cheese, and very very interesting
cheese additions that we can do to cheeses.

I would always choose something
like a bree. Something that is very very soft and unctuous at room temperature
that runs, that’s spreadable, very buttery. Delice bourgogne, or brillat
savarin are two very famous ones. And finally I would choose a blue
cheese like a roquefort or santamour which is a cow’s milk that’s
roquefort style or one of the basque cheeses which have a very very
old old history. They’re shep’s milk, but the sheep milk’s blue
so you get that raw milk flavor and very very strong blue flavor. That’s
what I would put on my cheese board, I would start with a bree, a blue,
a soft, a hard, and make sure I have some color in there. And that’s
the cheese board.

Jill
Now you said room temperature. You’re not talking Texas room temperature,
what temperature are we really saying?

Mr. Fromage
Yes I’m not talking front porch temperature because everyone on my
front porch it’s about 91 degrees in the shade. Room temperature,
68, 70 degrees. A morning outside or evening outside it’s gonna be
okay for several hours. You have to watch with things that are runny
like bree is runny because it doesn’t really hurt the flavor much
but it is really not appetizing to have it running all over the place.
But the cold, if you have cold cheese it dulls your palette, the cold
dulls your palette, as does the high altitude. So you’re gonna need
to make sure it’s room temperature so that you’re not cheating
yourself out of the flavor of the cheese.

Jill
What are the common fruits, what’s best fruits to put on a cheese
board? Would you do crackers, would you do bread?

Mr. Fromage
It would depend on the cheese. I always like to do a bread. If I’m
doing something unctious and soft like savaran or some kind of stinky
French soft cheese I would do like a bread stick, or a sliced bagette
I usually always include or a plain water cracker. I don’t want a
cracker that has a bunch of other junk on it because it interferes with
the taste of the cheese and I’m kind of a purist, I want to taste
the cheese, that’s why I bought it.

As far as fruit is concerned,
typical things that are eaten with cheddars and the harder cheeses would
be apples, grapes. The sheep cheeses are famously eaten with black cherry
confi and mimbreo, which is quintse paste. If you’ve ever had manchego
cheese, typically it’s gonna be served with quintse paste or mimbreo.
And then any kind of fig spread or apricot spread is going to go with
a variety of cheeses, and things like bree you can treat in a sweet
or a savory way. You could do like basil pesto on top of bree or you
could do something very modern like a fusion of raspberry and chipotle
on top of bree to please a bigger variety of your guests.

Jill
Last question. Is there a big difference between sheep cheese and goat
cheese?

Mr. Fromage
There is a difference between sheep and goat cheese. The description,
you can’t say good or better. The description would I think best be
summed up by saying goat cheese has a tanginess and a tartness to it
that is not present, it’s gonna be more absent in the sheep cheese.
Sheep cheese has a mellower, I would say rounder flavor, whereas the
goat is gonna have a real tang to it. It also depends on the treatment
of the cheese. If it’s whipped or if it has a lot of butter fat in
it because nubian goat milk has high butter fat content whereas sonin,
not so much. So it’s not gonna be as butter. Tackarina Romana cheese
has a sharpness to it, but that’s from the aging process, you get
all those calcium lactate crystals that form during the aging process
so that’s where the sharpness comes from.

Jill
Awesome. Thank you so much for your time.

Mr. Fromage
You’re very welcome.

Jill
You have educated me wonderfully. This is Jill from Simpledailyrecipes.com,
and I appreciate you listening.

Read the full interview

Jill:

So I am here at Jarvis Farms with Steve and Lynn Jarvis. Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. So tell me about the farm. How big is this place?

Steve Jarvis:

We have 111 acres. We have about five acres in blackberries right now. They are all thornless blackberries. That is our big main product. We produced about 6, 000 pounds of berries last year. We are probably going to produce about 10, 000 pounds this year.

Jill:

Wow. How many plants does that take?

Steve:

You know….

Jill:

Have you lost count?

Steve:

I have lost count to tell you the truth. You start going with plants and then you go into acres. Actually, we are a propagator of the thornless blackberry plants for Arkansas State University. We are getting reports of farms that are producing up to 10, 000 pounds per acre on these thornless blackberries.

Jill:

Wow!

Steve:

They are a hybrid blackberry developed by Arkansas State University, by Professor Clarke. We have those here on the farm. It is really nice picking. The berries are large. They are real sweet.

Jill:

They are sweet. They are good.

Steve:

That is our main crop that we grow. We also grow peaches, figs, tomatoes, squash, Israel melons, Cantaloupe, and Jalapenos.

Jill:

You have pecans in there.

Steve:

We do have Pecans.

Jill:

Do you have Pecan trees?

Steve:

No we don’t. We get our pecans from Texas. There is a farm out in South Texas and we get all of our pecans from them.

Jill:

I see that they are honey roasted and…

Steve:

Honey roasted and cinnamon frosted. That is right. We have those in stock at the store as well.

Jill:

Now, you just opened up your farm last year. How did the first year go?

Steve:

Very well. The big problem that we had was, we usually have approximately about 85 days of berry harvest. For 85 days, 62 of those days it poured rain all day long.

Jill:

Oh, that’s right!

Steve:

Last year was the rainiest year in 107 years in the state of Texas.

Jill:

I believe it.

Steve:

What is funny is the year before that it was the driest year in like 100 years in the state of Texas. So we have been through it all. We have been through drought and flood and we are still here.

To tell you a little bit about our farm, we started out, we have had the farm about 14 years. We had cattle, horses, and hogs. I had worked construction at that time as well. Due to market reasons, we decided to sell all of our hogs, cattle, and horses. We went looking for farms that had endured the ages and stuck around and that had been profitable for the families. We went and looked at orchards. That is when we decided to plant a few blackberries. We were introduced to the thornless blackberry plant. We liked that idea, but we had no idea what it would produce per acre. So here we are.

Jill:

That is the learning process.

Steve:

That is right.

Jill:

Now, you mentioned on your site that blueberries are high in anti-oxidants.

Steve:

Blackberries.

Jill:

Oh, I am sorry, blackberries. What did I say?

Steve:

Blueberries.

Jill:

Oh, I am sorry.

Steve:

Blueberries and blackberries both are high in anti-oxidants, probably equally as powerful in the anti-oxidant field for fighting all kinds of diseases. Most people don’t know that. But any of the dark berries, blueberries, blackberries, boysenberries, things like that. Any of those dark berries; it is the dark color.

Jill:

So you have people come out on the farm and pick. I saw your boys out there working hard. So what do you do with all the extra blackberries?

Steve:

What people don’t pick we retail. We have a lot of customers that don’t pick their own berries, so we pick a lot of berries for them. We retail on most of those.

The berries that are not retailed, we make a product called blackberry concentrate. We make it with sugar and without. It is real good to make blackberry milk. One tablespoon in a glass of 10 ounces of milk; very very good that way. Blackberry tea. We took lemonade and put blackberry in it the other day. That was very very good. Blackberry in 7-Up. You can put it over ice cream.

A lot of times, we put just a tablespoon in 16 ounces of water; just the middle of the day, it’s hot and you are kind of tired of drinking water, so you just add a little blackberry concentrate to that and away you go. It is kind of an energy boost.

Jill:

Now, how did you figure out to turn it into a concentrate? What did you have to do?

Steve:

Well, I got to thinking about George Washington Carver. George Washington Carver, early in the making of our country, he was a man who got all these farmers to plant all these peanuts. But the problem was they had no market for them. George Washington Carver, he said that God gave him the ideas, and he came up with 101 uses of the peanut. That is where peanut butter came from.

So I said to myself, one of the things that I noticed that farms did that did not last, what I realized was, is they did not create a good customer base and they did not have a retail product. They depended on the commercial market and wholesale market. Now, we do wholesale some of our blackberries at the Dallas market, but most of our berries go right straight to the public; from field to public immediately.

The blackberry concentrate was just an idea I had last winter. One thing is, I saw pomegranate juice, those things like that coming on the…next think you know…

Jill:

It is very hot, the pomegranate juice. All the juices…

Steve:

All these juices. The next thing you know they will have squash juice in a jar.

Jill:

Ewwww.

Steve:

Maybe not. But the thing is, I thought, well why can’t you do that with blackberries? We are going to produce about 10, 000 pounds of berries, so we have the extra berries if we need to. They are high in antioxidants and they are very good. If you are in the South and you don’t like blackberries, that means you moved here from the North.

Jill:

That is right! That’s right! [inaudible 5:58] blackberry bush.

[laughter]

Jill:

I see that you also have peaches and fig trees. When are those going to be ready? When can I come back for those?

Steve:

June 15th we start harvesting peaches. July fourth is when our Fig production starts coming in. We usually have about a three week really heavy fig crop in July, and then we have a second harvest September 15th.

Jill:

Do you have a newsletter or a way for people to give you their email address and let us know and notify us when you are ready?

Steve:

Basically, you can go to my website or you can just email me at steve@jarvisfreshfruits.com. Or you can go to our website, and that is www.jarvisfreshfruits.com. Go there and see what is going on on the farm.

Right now, in the busy time of the year, it is hard for us to…It is daylight to dark and then some It is hard for us. What we try to do is set up the preliminary work. We set all that stuff up for our picking dates in March and April, and things like that. So check the website then and see what is going on.

Jill:

OK.

Steve:

We have fishing on the farm. You can come and fish. We have family rates where you can fish for $5 a person. We have channel catfish, large mouth bass, and hybrid bluegill brim. The brim fishing is really good in June, July, and August. My little girl is six and she caught a six pound bass here two weeks ago.

Jill:

That was here on the website, wasn’t it?

Steve:

That’s right.

Jill:

Oh, man. I was a little jealous when I saw that.

Steve:

The fishing is really good here. We have camping. You can come and camp. Then the tomatoes will start coming off. We will start harvesting tomatoes…well, we started picking today, actually; tomatoes, squash.

Jill:

Now, you mentioned something for the men folk.

Steve:

That is right. For those who don’t want to pick or do berries or anything, in the winter, we have duck hunting. You guys that want to do some duck hunting, you can call or check our website for pricing and availability. We do basically three hunts a week. We do one one on Monday, one on Wednesday, and then we do a back to back hunt Friday and Saturday.

Jill:

Awesome. Now let’s see, what else do you have going on? You have chickens running around here.

Steve:

We do have chickens. We have fresh eggs available. They are $3 a dozen. They are limited supply, but we do have those.

Jill:

Great. I noticed something about Angus beef.

Steve:

That is right. We have Angus cattle. What do now, we just started this year, we use no antibiotics and no hormones in our cattle. They are grass fed beef. Now, we do grain the cows when we pull them off, for two weeks, before they go to slaughter. We slaughter in November and you get your beef in December.

Jill:

OK.

Steve:

The only thing we sell is hamburger. We grind everything into hamburger. It is $5 a pound. You book now and then you get your hamburger in December.

Jill:

OK. That is good to know.

Steve:

What you can do is you book your hamburger; we actually take credit cards: Visa, MasterCard, American Express. So you actually can call in, order your beef, pay for it on a credit card, and then in December we will call you with your order and how many pounds of hamburger you want.

Jill:

All right. Great. Now, as far as the jellies, preserves, and pecans, we can all find that online.

Steve:

That is correct.

Jill:

So if we are too far from the farm we can just go to your online store.

Steve:

That is right. We ship every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. We ship products all over the United States. Also, we have the blackberry plants for sale. We have four varieties of the blackberry plants. They are $8 per one gallon pot. What you can do, if you want to put a few blackberry plants in your yard, you can put….One blackberry plant, when it is three years old, will produce about 30 pounds of berries. So that will kind of give you an idea. So 10 plants in a yard…

And we also have fig trees available. We have them all the way from a one gallon pot all the way to a 50 gallon, which is a three year old fig tree ready for production. So if you want to put in some edible landscaping, we have all that too.

We have blueberry plants, blackberry, fig, peaches, plums; all those good fruit things if you want to put some of those in your yard.

Jill:

Awesome. That is great. You guys got it going on all over the place. You have got the whole thing covered. This is great.

Well, thank you so much for taking time out for me. We appreciate it. I just love what you are doing.

On today’s show, Ivy calls in from Greece to sing happy birthday to Francie. She has a beautiful voice and a great blog at http://www.kopiaste.blogspot.com so be sure to check it out. Also, be sure to leave a birthday shout for Francie on her Frantic Home Cook profile page.