Dishing Podcast

Annie Chesson loves one pot meals, photography, healthy food that tastes unhealthy, Sunday mornings, jeans and t-shirts, and her German Shepherd/Lab, Boone. In love with Fall and Christmas she is in constant bliss from mid September to December 26th.

Annie says she could spend all day watching Ree Drummond and The Kitchen rather than doing anything remotely productive. She is (maybe more than) slightly addicted to cooking. Her brain is constantly thinking of new recipes, how to lighten up existing recipes, and images of melty (which apparently isn't a word, but it should be) cheese and creamy pasta.

You could probably find Annie right now at her home in Manhattan, Kansas hangin' out with her baby, whipping up something for dinner, or thinking of random recipe ideas and scrawling them into a note on her iPhone before she forgets.

Annie is mom to an adorable baby boy - with a second little guy scheduled to arrive in early December, 2018 - and wife to her all time favorite taste tester.

Rizwan Asad is a self-taught baker, expert eater, and sometimes writer currently living in Toronto, Canada. You'll relate to him if you value a good home cooked meal. For him, the kitchen is a place for warm memories, a place to make new stories.

Riz has been a student of many things and a resident of many places. Ask him where he's from to hear him weave a story of a mischievous childhood, delectable food, and exotic places.

All you really need to know is that he studied at Hogwarts. No, seriously!

Riz's blog, Chocolates & Chai, is for lovers of comfort food, dessert, and brunch. Inspired by international cuisine, the blog is all about finding the love and the story behind every meal.

Initially created to share recipes with friends and family living around the world, the blog quickly grew a following—a devoted crowd of besties, and even got its own mascot—Hootie, the grumpy, ever-sleepy owl!

Natasha Bull grew up in a home where her Czech mom cooked everything from scratch. She developed a keen interest in cooking by watching her mom, but strangely enough, that same childhood experience did not rub off on her younger sister. Natasha picked up enough tips and tricks from her mom that she felt prepared to feed herself after moving out on her own when she finished university. Other domestic tasks? Not so much. In the years since, Natasha has been honing her cooking and recipe development skills.

Natasha regularly read food blogs for a couple of years prior to starting Salt & Lavender in 2015. One day she decided that if others can do it, so could she! She had always dreamed of starting her own business, and this was the perfect opportunity. The thought of having to learn how to photograph food well held her back for quite some time, but now it's one of her favorite things about food blogging.

Natasha's blog is all about wholesome recipes that are (mostly) made from scratch and simple to prepare. Juggling the blog, a full-time job, a husband, and two cats has helped Natasha narrow her focus to easy recipes that can be made on a weeknight.

You can almost always find garlic, Kalamata olives, butter leaf lettuce, lemons, fresh herbs, and Greek yogurt in Natasha's kitchen. She wishes you could also always find steak there.

When Natasha isn't testing a recipe or photographing food, you can find her exploring warmer places (she calls Edmonton, Canada home) or thinking about what she's going to eat for her next meal.

Betty Davies's blog, Slow the Cook Down, is about taking life down a notch—stopping to enjoy the smell wafting from the roast chicken you just pulled from the oven. Here, there's no reason to hurry or stress; dinner will get done and it will be delicious! Instead, pour a glass of wine and settle in to try something new.

Raised in a traditional English home, Betty grew up with a weekly Sunday lunch of roasted meat and potatoes and all the trimmings. It was a time when the family sat down together, caught up on the week and had a glass of wine. (Well, her parents did anyway!)

Now, all grown up, Betty does Sunday (and every day) her own way; taking it slow, cooking up something delicious, glass of wine in hand. She cooks for the pleasure of it, the chance to experiment, and the opportunity to try something new. There's nothing subtle about her food. It's big-flavor cooking with real personality. A lot like Betty!

Now living in Toronto with her husband and cat, Rufus, Betty loves discovering all the tastes that Canada has to offer, whilst bringing that bit of British tradition into the mix. Slow The Cook Down is a destination for cooks who truly love to cook. From the easy, everyday meals with added flare to the pull-out-all-the-stops Sunday suppers.

Amanda Batcher firmly believes life is all about balance: eat a salad, but enjoy some bacon along with it! A lifelong Midwest resident, she knows down-home, comfort food. Her recipes usually include a touch of decadence, and she is fond of incorporating bourbon or beer in her recipes as well!

When she's not in the kitchen, you'll find Amanda behind a camera, reading, and spending quality time with her husband and two children.

Sarah Newman's wide variety of experiences - from building and selling her own food blog to project management to copywriting to digital marketing - all set the stage for her to now be the business manager for the successful, healthy living site Root + Revel.

Sarah's newest passion project, Radically Radiant Life, is a podcast and community dedicated to supporting women in living their most authentic lives through self love and embracing their unique gifts.

Sarah's favorite things include the beach, cats, traveling the world and anything related to personal development and healthy living.

Links to Root + Revel posts mentioned in this interview:

• Affiliate Marketing for Bloggers: 10 Strategies to Increase Your Income
• Income Report: How I Made $75,000 Blogging in Year 2

Shadi HasanzadeNemati is a food writer, photographer and recipe developer who has an endless love for good food and sharing it with everyone. Through cooking and sharing recipes, Shadi tries to cherish the rich history of her culture's cuisine and memories she made before immigrating to the US.

Being a former English teacher and IT engineer, Shadi always had a strong passion for cooking and baking from a very young age and used to spend a lot of time in the Kitchen with her mother as she worked her magic through rose and saffron aromas. She was born and raised in Tehran, Iran and lived in Turkey for three years, then moved to the USA in 2015 after marrying her husband and now resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Shadi started her business, Unicorns in the Kitchen to share her enthusiasm for food with the world and introduce homemade Persian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisines to people who are interested in trying new cuisines and flavors.

In her free time, Shadi usually reads cookbooks, takes a long walk and watches movies. She enjoys spending time with her family and friends and trying new and interesting restaurants.

Shadi published her first cookbook, The Enchantingly Easy Persian Cookbook, in December 2016. She is also featured in different publications such as Allrecipes Magazine (June/July 2018) and writes regularly for Food52. She has also held a cooking demonstration and a dinner party at Harvard University.

Casey Markee believes that good SEO rankings are all about one word: content. Through his company Media Wyse, Casey helps food bloggers and site owners optimize content and find the best sites to strengthen backlink profiles. Casey helps generate blog content that attracts substantial traffic, as demonstrated by his dozens of link bait and infographic content pieces ranking at the top of Google organic search results in many different niches.

Casey's main specialty is conducting site audits, with an eye towards unraveling Google algorithmic penalty triggers, specifically: Usability, Panda, Penguin, and unnatural link identification and pruning issues. He has done hundreds of penalty site audits and has as many satisfied clients.

Casey is also an accomplished, industry-recognized public speaker with conference credits including: MN Search Summit, SearchFest, SMX Advanced, Pubcon, Food Bloggers Canada, State of Search, and others.

His true love lies in the professional SEO & Social Media training he provides through SearchEngineNews.com that has allowed him to personally train hundreds of individual digital marketers and dozens of in-house SEO teams on five different continents.

1. Everyone should do video or they won't stay relevant
2. If a big blogger is implementing something, then I should too
3. The more I publish, the better off I am and Google will love me
4. Having my site redesigned will boost my readership
5. 404s are bad for my site
6. Everyone should have an AMP version of their site
7. Domain authority is crucial in algorithmic calculations
8. Bounce rate and dwell time are important to Google
9. Google ranks for exact keyword matching and focus keywords
10. When I republish a post, I should change my URLs to match the new title
11. Structured date is a factor that Google ranks for
12. Don't use Jump to Recipeor Print to Recipebecause they lower revenue
13. The more words you use in your post, the better Google likes it
14. Sliders are user friendly and Google loves them

Jas Brechtl is a Bosnian expat who has been living in Northern Indiana since the summer of 1998, following a six-year exile in Germany. She is writer, cook, photographer, and an avid cheesecake lover.

Jas grew up in a traditional European family, the kind of family that sits together for big weekend lunches. Those lunches always began with some kind of soup. It isn't a big lunch unless you begin it with a spoon.

Based on her blog now, you'd never know that as a child Jas barely ate. Food didn't interest her in the least and actually disgusted her. She would eat enough just to survive, and even then it would be just a few things such as bread and soup….rather, broth. And there better not be anything floating in it or she wouldn't touch it.

Jas suffered from anorexia throughout her childhood, but not because she had issues with her weight. It wasn't that she didn't WANT to eat food, she just physically couldn't. She never actually felt hungry.

This promptly changed when Jas became pregnant with her daughter. Today she believes that pregnancy hormones changed something within her body, which in turn affected her metabolism. Suddenly, she found herself ravenously hungry and loving everything. Soon after that, the war in Bosnia started, and now that she wanted to eat, there was no food. Everything was scarce, and meatless bean soup (grah) would be the family's only meal for many days in a row.

Still, Jas was changed. She vowed that once her family escaped the war, food would be her medicine. She started experimenting with flavors; her daughter was her guinea pig for many new creations.

The seed was planted and Jas's American Dream realized once she was able to pursue blogging full-time from home. Now her family finds Jas in the kitchen most of the day. It's her happy place and her escape.

There are so many dishes in other countries you would never try if you didn't travel. Traveling somewhere new opens your eyes and your taste buds to a whole new range of authentic flavor profiles and foods that you wouldn't otherwise experience.

Jas believes the kitchen is a place where you can travel to any country without ever having to leave your house.

Gloria Duggan comes from a Ukrainian background, where the women of the house spent many hours cooking to feed their families. Growing up in a large family, get-togethers meant even more food. And of course all of it was homemade!! Everyone had her specialty dish and the combination of those dishes made yummy meals.

Constantly having such wonderful foods to eat fueled Gloria's enthusiasm for cooking and today she takes pleasure in cooking wonderful, pleasing meals for family and friends.

Over time Gloria created her own style, founded her own kitchen traditions and developed recipes that her family asks for again and again. She is not a trained chef, but rather an inspired and passionate home cook who isn't afraid of trying new things. Experimenting with new flavors and spices, different wines and cheeses, exotic fruits and vegetables is very exciting to her and her family.

Gloria hopes to inspire those who fear the kitchen to relax and try something new. Cooking doesn't have to be difficult or complicated. In fact sometimes simple is best. You might even surprise yourself and find you really like a food you wouldn't even consider trying before.

Gloria's philosophy is: Food doesn't have to be complicated, but it does have to taste good!