A Paupered Year in Review: Most Bizarrely Popular

These posts are what we'd call sleepers.  When published, they didn't always make much of a splash.  Sometimes, they were haphazard little posts we threw up in a rush.  We expected people to smile a little, maybe comment, then the posts would fall into the archives forever.

Thank God for Google.  As the year progressed, we started to notice that many people were arriving at our website through the same search terms, and the same posts.  Were these posts the ones we put the most effort and research into?  Nope.  In the meantime, our long, researched, labor-of-love posts go by without a comment.  We'll bring you those tomorrow.

Is Broiling a Steak as Good as Grilling One?

One day I saw steak on sale at Fairway.  It was too cold to pull out the grill, but I was really hankering for that charred, robust taste that wouldn't happen if I threw it on the stovetop.  So it went under the broiler and made a nice little dinner and took some nice close pictures.  I started writing it up, made some not-very-funny jokes, and with no clever ideas for a title, just told it like it was.  The next day Gothamist has picked up the post, and the Google hits started coming in.  This is currently our most-linked-to post of all time.
- Blake

Egg Mayonnaise and Cress

This one I really can't figure out.  The picture is not terribly good, the recipe was one that I probably spent five minutes to find, and the results were average enough that I haven't made it again.  I would feel okay if Americans were just curious and wanted to try some English staples, because this seems like a good intro.  But no. Apparently the English didn't have many recipes for egg and cress sandwiches, because most of the searches come from google.co.uk.  Although I did live in London at one point in time, which helped inspire this post, the recipe is probably not authentic.  I've probably led lots of British people astray.
- Nick

Learning the Traditional Foods of Estonia

While visiting Estonia, I took pictures of everything I ate, wanting to write a detailed recount of my trip.  But when I got home, the number of pictures and amount of material was overwhelming.  So I cranked out a quick chronological summary of everywhere I'd gone like a diary, and threw in the pictures.  Now, when anybody types in Estonia into Google, along with the name of a food, they come here.  On a regular basis, I receive emails inquiring how to make all sorts of traditional Estonian foods.  This is, apparently, one of the definitive articles on Estonian food available on the Internet.
- Blake

English Cucumber Sandwiches

This was a joke.  I'd just never had them before, and thought it'd be funny to make one of the most famous sandwiches in literature (from Oscar Wilde's The Important of Being Earnest ).  Which is why, I guess, this post still pulls people in.  Not that it was itself literature.  Not a terribly popular post when first premiered, but it slowly started to pick up steam about a month in and hasn't stopped since.  These, unlike the egg and cress sandwiches, were actually very tasty.
- Nick

Best of 2006