The Google Search

This posting will have no recipe and no (real) mention of food, so if that's what you're looking for stop reading and come back tomorrow. I got home pretty late last night (around midnight!)--for a weeknight. That meant I had to skip a shower this morning if I wanted seven hours of sleep. So yeah, no photos of the chickpea salad I made the other night. But I'd like to take a moment to share something with you all that I find incredibly amusing about my blog. I embedded a stat counter on my site so I could see how many people visited, where they live, how they got here, how many children they have, what kind of car they own, what they eat for breakfast (just kidding). Before you freak out, don't worry, I don't know who you are. Unless you're Craig because you're the only person I know in Decatur, Ga., and Maria because you're the only person I know in Evanston, Ind. and I know they both read my blog regularly. Other than that, you're all anonymous. Mostly, the stat counter gives me an unecessary ego boost whenever someone visits. It's pretty great, except those days when no one visits ... If you'll take a glance to the right of this posting you'll see a little box with numbers in it. On this date it should hover around 3000. This is not an impressive number for those of you unfamiliar with normal Web traffic. (Oh and you can't embed this into your facebook profile, in case you were wondering.) OK, I'm getting to the point. The thing that amuses me is seeing what people search on Google that leads to my Web site. Some of it is pretty normal. I've gotten a lot of cranberry-tangerine muffins and amaretto biscottis. I also get a lot of "food eaten in (Japan, Costa Rica, Honduras, etc)" which makes sense considering the title of my blog is Food Eaten. But then I get a lot of great searches having to do with mistakes I've made in cooking. I'm guessing all the "what happens when I forget to add the salt/baking soda/flour to cookies" searches went to this post. Here's the quick answer: no salt=no flavor, no baking soda=rock hard cookies, no flour=runny cookies that melt and drip off the cookie sheet and start a sugar fire. Once once someone searched "shortbread mishap." I wonder what happened to them? I doubt it's similar to what I did, but I'd love to know. Someone searched "I made a chef boyardee pepperoni pizza from the box and they now give you less sauce and pepperoni." I'm afraid I was no help there. But there are a few standouts. My first strange google search was "food eaten on gossip girl." I am unable to answer that query, but I do wonder why someone felt a need to know what food they ate on an episode of that show. Did they get in an argument at work and were settling it with the google search? Maybe they wanted to eat at one of the restaurants featured in the show. In for runner-up would be "left chili on the stove all night is it still good." I'm a little embarrassed that someone found my site using that search, but if I'm being honest it sounds like something I would do. But my favorite all-time search, not likely to be replaced, is "most food eaten in mcdonalds." It's not so much the subject of the search that I love so much as that the searcher was from Sarah Palin's hometown, Wasilla, Alaska. This happened right after the election, in fact, right after Palin's turkey publicity stunt. I got such a kick out of the fact that surely Tree and Track Palin had had a disagreement about the most popular menu item at McDonalds and decided to do some investigative journalism to discover the answer. They probably don't know about Wikipedia.