The last months have not only been filled with work for my upcoming book - a lot of work, to be precise - but because of another exciting project that was kicked off, under the covers so to speak, sometime last summer. The German publishing house Gräfe und Unzer had established an electronic publishing unit, that was working on a new cooking portal: Küchengötter (cooking gods...) - offering thousands of the publishing house's tested recipes, a community with handy features and last but not least, a blog within.

The German speaking side of the Internet is definitely not short of cooking portals, but surprisingly, none of them comes with a well written blog. So when Sebastian and I were asked to fill in some of the blanks, we just couldn't say no. The editors, the team and the supervising agency were a blast to work with (and still are!), despite being quite intimidated of the sheer amount of work lining up on the horizon. Turbulent times lie ahead!

Countless concepts were devised, tons of input and feedback was given, kitchen videos were shot, well-known guest bloggers and journalists were hired, weekly meetings were held and the launch date approached at the speed of light. Are we all done yet? Certainly not, but I would like to invite all German speaking readers to check out the online beta version for a first glance. With your help Küchengötter will blossom over the next months, many more great features are in the pipeline, but I can't tell you yet - it's the 'I could, but then I'd have to kill ya' kinda secret ;)

Oh, and before I forget and leave you in the dark regarding the headline: the timing couldn't have been any worse - two days before launch my voice turned from horsy and raspy to barely more than a ghost of a faded whisper - lar-un-jye-tus. Laryngitis sucks and my doctor told me to not speak for an entire week. This is seven times 24 hours. The worst medication I've ever been on.