A tenth floor view of the Inner Sunset neighborhood 

I usually don't post on Wednesdays but you know me, I like to keep you on your toes. 

This past weekend I attended the BlogHer Food conference in San Francisco. It was a whirlwind weekend full of good food, old and new friends and some seriously awesome swag from the Chef's Catalog at an after-party hosted by a few lovely bloggers. 

This was the fourth BlogHer conference I've attended (BlogHer '08, BlogHer Boston and BlogHer '09). I like to post about the conference because I enjoy them. Every time I leave a BlogHer conference, I usually feel better about myself as a writer and quite frankly, as a person. The conferences remind me that there is more to the world than my own small universe here in New Jersey and that I have a lot left to do and see in my lifetime. 

I don't always bore you with all the details, each time. However, if you're reading this blog, you probably like food. Since this conference was about food (to be specific, it was about food blogging but at the end of the day, thoughts were on food) it just seems right to highlight some of my favorite conference moments and pieces of information that I picked up. 

I began my trip to San Francisco with a visit to one of my oldest and dearest friends (I feel OLD when I say the word dearest but for lack of a better term…) who moved to the Bay Area shortly after college. Meagan and I have been friends since we were spoiled, fresh-mouthed twelve-year olds and we had fun reminiscing over cocktails at Absinthe, a bar with a speakeasy vibe that I highly recommend to anyone visiting San Francisco. 

Friday brought a trip to the Ferry Building Farmer's Market with my friend and colleague Jessi and sampled some of California's finest produce and chocolates (healthy balance, right?)

Macarons and sea salts aside, I loved meeting the other bloggers at the conference who I knew mainly from Twitter and from browsing some of their websites. On Friday night, Denise and Lenny of Chez Us, the San Francisco locals of the group, organized a great dinner at Pauline's Pizza, where the wine flowed generously and we noshed on pesto pizza and roasted vegetable pizza.    

After dinner, a few of us kept the party going over cocktails at Clock Bar. Joy of Gourmeted, Dana of Dana Treat, Kristina from Tennessee Locavore and I teased our cute, curly-haired waiter and drank cocktails called: humuhumunukunukuapua'as. (Disclaimer: I had 2 sips of mine when Joy declared that it tasted like perfume. She was right so I promptly send it back). 

Now where were we? Oh right, a blogger conference. On Saturday, I attended three of the nine available sessions that focused topics including: photography basics, blogging best practices and finding your blogging voice and identity. If you want to know more about the topics covered during these sessions, please e-mail me and I'll share my notes with you. I'm not going to post them since a lot of you are here for recipes and not SEO tips (raise your hand if you even know what SEO is!).

Overall, I thought the conference was extremely beneficial: for social and informational purposes. I could talk about it for hours but I can only imagine that kind of time commitment would be a tall order from most of my readers. 

So in short, I met some great new bloggers and picked up some invaluable tips. You can read about some of them, including how to use your food blog to save the world and best practices in blogging on BlogHer.com. I'll also be updating my blog roll in the coming days so keep an eye out for some great new food blogs to check out!