Happy 1st Birthday UAE Food Bloggers!

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A few months ago, a friend and fellow food blogger, sent me a link to a Facebook group and suggested that I join.

Since it was a food related group, I didn’t hesitate to click “Ask to Join Group”.

The best thing about it? It was local – involving primarily UAE food bloggers. A microcosm of the larger food blogging community. The thing about food bloggers is that there’s so many of us. There are more interesting food blogs than I will ever have time to read.

Being a part of a local blogging community means that I can put a face to everyone’s blog name, twitter handle, and Facebook page. I’ve met some of the most talented writers and photographers who have inspired me to be as good as they are one day.

Most importantly, I’ve met a whole new set of friends and enjoy reading and learning from all the varied and diverse blogs that they have created.

As a resource, the group has been invaluable to me for things like locating hard to find or unknown-to-me ingredients (like where can I buy zeresht in Dubai?), for answering technical blogging questions (like which comment plugin to use), and for the moral support they’ve provided in the form of tweets when I’m having a bad day or when I “broke” my blog and didn’t know how to get it back online.

I started this blog in 2007 (when it was called “Out and About in Dubai”) to keep my friends and family updated on the happenings of my new life in Dubai. But after a few months, I stopped blogging for a few years because I lost focus. There was so much to write about that I took the easy/lazy road and didn’t write about any of it.

Since joining Fooderati Arabia (or FiA), the name of the UAE food bloggers group, it has helped me find my calling. All those incessant food photos that I’ve been taking all these decades (gosh I feel old using that word)? And all the time that I’ve been going on and on about the perfect pizza or the worst wiener or the best bulgogi?

Well it could now all be written up and photographed in my blog! Because food and photography are two things that I feel passionate about and what most people who know me, know me for. The transformation of this blog into Ginger and Scotch in May of this year made my blog’s reincarnation and my return to blogging complete.

So I would like to thank Nausheen for tossing me into the frying pan…a reference to the lovely Arva of I Live in a Frying Pan who’s brainchild of a community of a UAE food bloggers has now reached the tender age of 1 year and whose members now surpass 50.

Arva has also written a touching and heart-warming post about FiA turning 1-year old. I hope you will take a moment to read it to get a sense of how FiA was created – complete with a humorous timeline – how it’s grown, and how invaluable being a part of this group has become to many of us.

If you are a UAE food blogger and would like to join an awesome (if I do say so myself), diverse, sometimes crazy but always fun- and food-loving group please visit our FiA Facebook page. Besides regular outings to local restaurants, we also organize knowledge-sharing workshops, cultural awareness luncheons, food tastings and many other fun activities!

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