Every Friday is 11 Things day at Living Behind the Curve.

Man, the last few weeks have been long ones around the Behind The Curve Abode. Dani ended a job, began a new one, and has gone through finals for the summer semester, all pretty much at the same time. A lot of her chores have fallen to me, with greater or lesser degrees of success, and I’ve mostly been assigned to 24-hour intensive emotional support. A bunch of things have fallen through the cracks recently, some more important, like cleaning the bathroom (… ew), and some rather less important, like submitting to 4 blog carnivals a week.

Our traffic has definitely taken a hit from not doing the carnivals, but to my great surprise, it hasn’t died away completely. Our hits aren’t as consistent day to day as they were a month ago, but even bad days aren’t really all that bad. The astonishing thing is that despite the drop in daily pageviews, our subscription rate has continued to grow steadily, and I think that is really cool.

According to our logs, what seems to keep people coming back are our posts about food and cooking, and particularly everything we’ve written about the SRSLY method of slow cooking. (I especially want to say hi to my buddy RhondaJWL and everyone else in the Living With Less board over on Delphi Forums, who have been frolicking all the heck over my SRSLY pages lately. Hi guys!) It seems to have been this way from the beginning, but the more we blog, the more pronounced the preference seems to be.

All this is to say that Dani and I took the hint and decided to kick off a new blog dedicated entirely to food, cooking, recipes and kitchen gadgets, CatchTheSpoon.com. I’m completely prejudiced, but I think this site is so cool that if you cut it, it would bleed the color of awesome, and in accordance with that, this week I’m bringing you 11 Compelling Reasons To Go Check Out CatchTheSpoon.com Right Now.

1. Food porn makes the world go round. I mean seriously, pretty pictures may not be the most profound reason to visit a blog, but it helps. I don’t know where Dani finds the pictures she pairs with every entry when she doesn’t take them herself, but they’re consistently stunning.

2. It doubles as a recipe database. It isn’t very apparent now, but as the weeks and months pass, the recipes will pile up and be fully text searchable, as well as tagged by major ingredient, themes, features, special diet concerns, and whatever else we can think of. With just a little bit of time, you’ll be able to type in what ingredients you have on hand, and the blog will tell you what you’re having for dinner. How cool is that?

3. Everyone should eat more brunch. America has been profoundly shaped by it’s puritan fore bearers, and I firmly believe this is evidenced in the fact that, unlike the Continentals, we’ve never been able to come up with a better excuse to drink before noon than brunch. Sure it’s elitist and a little kitschy, but you can serve anything from oatmeal to salad to pastries to steak and it’s all wonderful, and you can serve it all with champagne and bloody mary’s (or is that bloody maries?). Catch The Spoon’s Sunday Brunch feature will bring you food perfect for your lazy weekend ritual.

4. Learn historical stuff. Traditional American food trends hard towards wholesome, simple, and home-preserved — it’s peasant food, but since the American immigrant peasantry that came swarming to our shores in the late 1800’s came from quite literally from all over the world, the variety is breathtaking. On Saturdays, you’ll get some great selections from the oldest American cookbooks we can find in the Forgotten Cookbooks series and get a good healthy dose of wonderful ethnic American cooking.

5. TGIF, dude. Fridays at five, we have happy hour and you get a refreshing cocktail bonus post to gear you up for the weekend.

6. Yes, we really need more kitchen gadgets. Kitschy Kitchen Wednesdays are all about those perfectly weird and wild must have kitchen gizmos. It’s like Bed, Bath and Beyond had Spencer’s Gift’s love child, and that love child was a store, and that store is having a sale. It’s food-grade retail therapy, baby.

7. Our link roundup is actually good. I don’t know how many blogs you read, but if you’re wise, you read fewer than me. The link roundup is a standard post in the blogosphere, and at their best, link roundups provide a smallish collection of informative, entertaining links from across the internet. Unfortunately, link roundups are too often a hasty bunch of tired Google fodder slapped together by burnt or blocked bloggers in lieu of real posts. I almost never read link roundups, but this one, I read. There’s a chance that I may be the only person to find these posts interesting, but Dani really manages to find outstanding, informative stuff. I don’t know how to convey my honesty other than to say that these posts are written 5 feet away from me and I still read them top to bottom when they go live on Mondays.

8. The layout is dead sexy. I mean, go look at it!

9. Get more of that girl you know and love. Dunno if you’ve noticed, but things here on Living Behind The Curve have kind of become pretty much my show over the last few weeks. With classes starting up in a month, and Dani’s course load being fully double what mine is, that’s probably not going to change a whole lot in the near future. Catch The Spoon, on the other hand, is all Dani, all the time, so you are always guaranteed to get your daily Dani fix. I think the only thing I can take credit for over there is the copyright statement at the bottom.
10. Make it your own. We love hearing your recipes. You can call us or email us with your favorites, and they’ll be sent out to the world and interred in our archives, and you’ll never misplace grandma’s secret oyster stuffing recipe ever again.

11. You get a fresh recipe every day. Every day, in your email, or in your feed reader, or on the site, will be new potential for something delicious to try. You are what you eat, why not make it good?

Alright, everyone, that’s all I got. Go sign up at Catch The Spoon, and have an excellent weekend.