FIRST YEAR’S GREATEST HITS
Happy Birthday to us!
As of March, 2024, this site is one year old; still a toddler, to be sure, but on its way always to give you help both to “get” cooking and to “Get cooking!”
During those 12 months, 14,000+ unique visitors looked in on the site, more than 18,000 times, and viewed more than 43,000 pages. BSJ is grateful. Here’s a run-down, with links, of the “top fives” within the top five most-visited sections of GET COOKING WITH BILL ST JOHN.
Recipes is the site’s most popular section and, while there, more folks wanted Gene Amole’s Turkey Stuffing recipe than any other. The next four, in order: Cioppino, the fish stew, and a way-cool Traditional Mexican Guacamole. Subbing meat for a vegetable, a Whole Head of Cauliflower Pot Roast; and the famed Béarnaise soup from southern France called Garbure.
The 2nd most popularly visited section is Videos. I’ve got dozens, where I show you lots about both cooking and wine. The five tops: How to Dice a Carrot, How to Use a Chef’s Knife, Four Ways with Mashed Potatoes, How to Roast Vegetables, and Slicing the Mango.
The third section on the list is Wine, and, there, the five most-seen posts are, in order: The Little Black Bottle (about those wines most flexible with food), Small-Print Champagne, and a story about a guy who guesses a mystery wine. Rounding out the five are visits to two wine “categories”: All About Red Grapes and Wine Basics.
Number Four on the most-visited list of sections is Basics, where I cover all sorts of cooking and how-to basics, as well as play in the pantry to help you make fundamentals such as stocks or sauces, or to learn the basics of various cuisines. In order, the top five most-seen posts here are A Thanksgiving Dinner Prep Calendar, How to Cook Fish, Pasta How-Tos, some Kitchen Hacks and the Foundations of Mesoamerican and Mexican Cuisine.
Rounding out the five most trafficked areas of the site is Ask Bill, the place where I answer your questions about how to “get cooking.” Guys, you have sent in some cool queries. I answer them, in order of your reading interest, 1st through 5th, about Green Vegetables for Thanksgiving Beyond the Brussel Sprout, About Garlic, Showing Beans Who’s the Boss, Best Practices for Washing and Cleaning Greens, and A Suggested Vegetarian Menu for Six.
Photo from Pavil Tankilevitch on pexels.com
And here’s a bit about the weekly newsletters that went along with all those posts as they unfolded over March 2023 to March 2024. (If you’d like to receive the weekly email/newsletter, just sign up below, lower right near the bottom of this page.)
I’ve sent out 50+ weekly newsletters since launching GET COOKING WITH BILL ST JOHN in March 2023. These are the Top Ten, based on numbers of “opens” and “click-throughs” from you readers, a gauge of the interest in the topic mentioned. Thought you might be interested to see this list; you generated it.
I should have said “Top 13” for, far and away, the three most-hit newsletters covered cooking for Thanksgiving, with posts such as Thanksgiving Dinner Prep Calendar, Gene Amole’s Turkey Stuffing and videos such as How to Roast a Turkey.
After that deluge (of gravy . . .), these are the Top Ten most-hit newsletters and a link from each that distilled or targeted that newsletter’s content:
How to Cook Fish and its top post, appropriately called How to Cook Fish.
Valentine’s Day Dinner, a menu all in red, and its recipe for Beets Roasted in Foil and Buttered.
A Winter Warmer Menu and a recipe that a reader asked me to make to remind them of home, Copycat Cincinnati Chile.
New Year’s Cookings and its recipe for Long-Cooked Vegetables. As one cook said of it, “Looks like hell; tastes like heaven.” True, that.
School-Night Dinner, a soup-to-nuts menu that included this favorite recipe: Super-Smooth Warm Hummus.
Sample All My New Wine Content, with many links from the site’s Wine section.
Answers to Questions? Yes! where I answered some of your questions, among which concerned “Coronation Chicken,’ a recipe of Queen Elizabeth II’s at the time of her ascendancy, adapted by me as Coronation Chicken II.
Souper Super Bowl: Guac and More with a recipe for a Traditional Mexican Guacamole (one of the more popular recipes searched for last year overall).
Why France Matters and its recipe—perfect for cooking in Spring—for Salade Niçoise.
And Cool Summer Cooking that deconstructed the BLT Three Ways.