Yahoo! Picks - bringing you the best of the Web since 1995

Seems like everyone's a foodie these days. People stick their noses in the air and rave about organic, grain-fed asparagus and hand-picked, shade-grown chicken, all cooked in delicate fusions of seasonal sauces and paired with eclectic, flinty wines. Um, yeah.

Instead of hipster eats, we'll take some history for dinner, thanks to Janet, "the Old Foodie," who we discovered late last year. This culinary blogger has been serving up 400 words on the history of food, plus a fascinating recipe, pretty much every day for a couple years now.

Janet bypasses current trends and instead gives context to long-standing food favorites from around the world like coffee (nope, not invented by Starbucks). She even indulges us with a peek into the stranger pots of the past with recipes such as roast camel's hump (does not taste like chicken!). We popped into Janet's virtual kitchen to see what's cooking now.

Why did you start this blog?

My son nagged me to do it, that's the short answer! I have been interested in food for as long as I can remember, and in food history for almost as long. I wanted to improve my writing and to get more efficient at it, with a long-term goal of it playing a bigger part in my retirement (whenever that happens!). I decided to commit to sending little stories out every weekday to friends and family, as a writing discipline, to see if they had an appeal and to get feedback. Pretty soon, I found that my emails were being forwarded to others who I didn't know.

From the beginning my son nagged me to "blog" them. At that time I don't think I even knew what a blog was. Eventually, to get him off my back by proving it was technically beyond me, I logged onto Blogger.com... and within a few minutes had a blog! I was so amazed I decided instantly to take the risk and go public. It has been—and still is—enormous fun.  Read the full profile...