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Ontario, Canada
I am a wife, mother and grandma who enjoys the many aspects of homemaking. A variety of interests and hobbies combined with travel keep me active. They reflect the importance of family, friends, home and good food.
Cook ingredients that you are used to cooking by other techniques, such as fish, chicken, or hamburgers. In other words be comfortable with the ingredients you are using.
--Bobby Flay

For Your Information

Please watch this area for important information like updates, food recalls, polls, contests, coupons, and freebies.
  • [March 19, 2020] - Effective Mar 17, this blog will no longer accept advertising. The reason is very simple. If I like a product, I will promote it without compensation. If I don't like a product, I will have no problem saying so.
  • [March 17, 2020] - A return to blogging! Stay tuned for new tips, resources and all things food related.
  • [February 1, 2016] - An interesting report on why you should always choose organic tea verses non-organic: Toxic Tea (pdf format)
  • Sticky Post - Warning: 4ever Recap reusable canning lids. The reports are growing daily of these lids losing their seal during storage. Some have lost their entire season's worth of canning to these seal failures! [Update: 4ever Recap appears to be out of business.]

Popular Posts

Saturday, January 03, 2009

A New Look for 2009

I apologize for not keeping you updated on the new blog changes and thank-you for your patience. By now you have likely noticed all the tinkering I was doing yesterday. A couple of months ago I stumbled upon The Cutest Blog on the Block. I loved the scrolling design for the background so changed this blog to a pink and black polk-a-dot from them. In the meantime I set about making my own designs for all of my blogs. I just love PhotoShop®! The design for the cooking blog took a little longer and I'm will be doing a bit of tinkering yet.

The colour theme for this blog has been shades of pink from it's inception inspired by colour scheme of the kitchen in our old house. The pink has become a trademark so I wanted to keep the pink but tone it down a bit from the temporary pink and black. The wooden cafe building is a picture of an actual kitchen decoration from our old kitchen. It was one of the first images I learned to remove backgrounds on. I hope you like the new background and header. I had a lot of fun making both. There will still be a few changes coming over the next couple of days but they should be minor.


2 food lovers commented:

Anonymous said...

Constructive criticism:

When I open the post. I can see a large header image, a long welcome message, a long canning message about altitudes, an ad, then the date of the post. I see absolutely nothing of the post in the first screen. Perhaps it's just my resolution/monitor size, but I can start reading other blogs without having to scroll as soon as I load them.

Could some of those things be moved elsewhere so at least a little post could be seen when it first loads?

Thanks (feel free to delete this comment if you wish).

Garden Gnome said...

Hi and thanks for visiting and thank-you for the constructive criticism of the new design.

Nothing in my centre panel (the scrolling portion) has changed as far as size. The only thing that changed was the main background design, the header design not size and the colours of the post/sidebar backgrounds but the sizes have remained the same. So as far as how the site loads it should and does load exactly the same it did in the past using Camino, Safari and IE.

Many blogs are set up so you have to scroll to get to the first post. As headers go this is a smaller header at 730 x 312, less than half the size of many blog headers and even smaller than the headers of two of my other blogs. It's optimized so should not cause a loading problem. The long welcome message is 6 lines long, not outside of the the norm and the same as before. The canning message at 5 lines is very important warning because a lot of the recipes on this blog are canning related. Being a FoodBuzz featured publisher both the ad and badge are dictated as to where they can appear. Unfortunately these elements cannot be moved to another position on the blog. The good news is the blog posts start directly under the welcoming section. And I do think the posts are worth scrolling for :)

Again thanks and I hope you continue to read this blog.