About
Hello! My name’s Blake, and I’m a 32-year-old guy living in New Orleans with my wife and best friend, Beez, our handsome poodle, Chopper, and our baby boy, Benny! I was born and raised in Central Louisiana (Tioga! Represent!), I graduated from LSU in ‘03 with a degree in advertising and then I moved to New Orleans. It didn’t take long for Beez and I to decide to stay here for the rest of our lives. Now, my mind is an incessant whir of ideas – I have a million of them, so I guess I’m lucky that I have my dream job. BlakeMakes started as a food blog, but then it turned into something else. One day it dawned on me that food wasn’t all I could make, and once I realized that, BlakeMakes evolved. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a food blog (you can take the boy out the country-fried steak…), but it’s also a blog about my life, my work, my ideas, my travels, my city, my family, my house and, at times, my poodle.
Yums. I’ll start with the food yummies. Right now, my favorite foods are peanut butter, chocolate, Nutella (really, anything chocolate-hazelnut), cookies, cakes, pies, crusty-charred-and-chewy naan smeared with masala gravy and dipped in basmati rice, all the food I ate in Italy in 2008 (especially that white truffle pasta and that ginger-cinnamon gelato), all the food I ate in Chicago (Alinea) and Paris (Le Cinq) in 2009, Junior Mints melted into hot movie popcorn, iced lemon pound cake from Starbucks, gingersnaps, meat pies (with pepper jelly and whole grain mustard) from Charlie’s Seafood in Harahan, freshly fried corn dogs, fresh-crispy-salty-hand-cut french fries, anything from a food truck, St. G cocktails from Mondo, my mom’s peach cobbler…
I’ll end with the life yums. I love the sound of walking over smooth river stones, or crunchy sidewalk/driveway gravel. I love to travel. I love riding in trains. I love ordering room service. I love cold, gray, rainy days. I wish I read more, but books rarely hold my attention long enough to finish them. That’s why I prefer magazines, although I mostly just look at the pictures. I love TV. I want to learn how to play the guitar, then the mandolin, then the piano and finally the violin. I want to learn conversational French, Spanish, Italian, German and Chinese. I listen to KCRW Eclectic24 8-12 hours a day. I’m an Amazon 1-click addict. I love Disney World.
Yucks. A good foodie should never be a picky eater. I despise picky eaters, and have talked badly both behind the backs and to the faces of the ones I have encountered. That said, I do have a short list of foods I avoid. I won’t use the word “hate,” but I don’t love fennel (although I’ll eat it), avocado (although I’ll eat it) and blue cheese (although Paris 2009 changed my mind). I’m avoiding basil these days; I’m not sure why. I never discriminate against Pop Tarts except for the Cherry ones. The life yucks are easy. I hate negativity. That pretty much covers all manner of sins.
If you’re looking for an old post from BlakeMakes v1, it’s all here.
