The Great Baclava Recipe

Photo: Brian Leatart, via Gourmet.com

Thomas kindly notified me: his fine blog, Anatomy of Melancholy, just received some high-traffic exposure from the Dame herself in The Huffington Post. Arianna Huffington, currently visiting our corner of the world for a refreshing dip in the Aegean, might have missed the Olympics by almost a full year but did not miss an opportunity to promote what she describes roughly as global blogging practices -- even going as far as hinting at the suitability of blogging as the next Olympics' new competition event!

Apparently, blogging is a trend affected by globalization's reprecussions in the information processing and dissemination industry. Huffington stresses blogs' role in "the democratization of the media" in the US and is eager to present equivalent cases, if not processes, elsewhere. Her choice of post among Thomas' array of interesting subjects is not without reason: the post singled out deals with the tragicomical construction known as the Greek state civil service bureaucracy. But rather than resting the case on the clientelistic system in effect (widely so until only a few years back), Huffington sharply points at the similarity of such with holding practices in Washington, D.C. In case her American readers didn't realize, well -- it's the same democratization needed in both sides of the Atlantic. (And just the one blogs like The Huffington Post are already dealing with.)

As regular readers of this blog might recall, I was particularly vocal when our North American readership climbed to over 20 percent of hits received. Greece is a small country with a relatively low internet penetration index and the vast majority of Greeks who are actively blogging prefer to do so in their mother tongue. For our international readers' benefit, a discussion of readworthy greek blogs in English was posted here less than two months ago. (A follow-up is in order.) At least one of the blogs Ms. Huffington provides links for, Histologion, is in English and (as we had also pointed out) a good departure point for those American readers who might wish to venture into modern Greek blogging reality.

As it happens, I survey the greek blogosphere on a daily basis and often present interesting findings for my greek-language blog. In order to do this, I closely follow over 120 blogs through an automated feeder-service. Well, believe it or not, there are only three blogs in Greek focusing on food and recipes and two of them are written by non-greeks! And I've yet to find a recipe of the famous greek Baclava in a greek-language blog. Which rather makes sense, given that any Greek actually looking for recipes in a greek blog would already know how to make (good?) Baclava. A cheese cake recipe search would be more logical for us.