Imagine being the new kid at school, and feeling awkward, geeky, unsure of yourself. Then imagine the elation of being invited, with no pretense or trouble, to sit at the “cool kids table” and discovering that they are not just cool – they are talented, kind, interesting and completely happy to include you in their fun.

This was what it was like for me at the BlogHer Conference 2007. It was a whole weekend in Chicago, surrounded by bloggers of all passions, including a healthy contingent of food bloggers. There were panels on how to increase site traffic and how to tell a story, and more specific discussions on food blogging with and food photography by masters of the craft.

And then there was the after-hours celebration. The first night, I joined 30 or so food folks at Lao Sze Chuan in Chinatown. We all sat around three massive tables that sagged with the weight of the dishes. The wine flowed, the conversation bubbled, and stealing from others’ plates was encouraged. (Though I had fun grazing other tables with my chopsticks, the Smoked Tea Duck from my table was still my favorite.)

Though the whole conference was fascinating, it was that dinner that encapsulated the experience for me. The world of blogging can be incredibly isolating. You write your words, and no matter how much feedback you get through comments and emails, it’s still just you sitting in front of a machine. This was the first time that the digital community I’ve been discovering over the past few months became real to me. Eating is meant to be a social process, and in that moment, distant friends became close as we all sat in one room together, communicating freely, without a laptop in sight.

My friend Emily works for Merriam-Webster as a “definer.” Part of her job is to identify and campaign for popular words that aren’t in the dictionary but should be. In the past, she’s successfully lobbied for “spaghetti strap” and “transfer station,” won “badass” a second definition and pleased English-speaking fetishists everywhere by the getting the Collegiate to recognize the slangish usage of a phrase whose other meaning is a synonym for “pudding-pipe tree.”

Last Friday, she called me wondering what to call a “cheeselover”. She’d poked around a little and heard that “caseophile” (Latin caseo for “cheese” + English -phile for “one who loves it”) was a possibility. This was what I would have suggested as I heard it often during my time as a cheesemaker. Plus, there’s the Caseus Prize, which is awarded every year to the best cheese trolley in Italy, and the International Caseus Award, which celebrates cheeses protected by PDO.

But then I got an email from her yesterday in which she reported that she was going with “turophile,” which comes from the irregular from Greek tyros cheese + -phile. The word, which apparently dates back to 1938. I’d never heard it before. Has anyone else?

Correction: Emily is not “going with” the word turophile, as it’s already been “gone with,” as in it’s already in the dictionary. Emily writes: “I’m guessing ‘caseophile’ has started cropping up because people don’t know about ‘turophile.’ it’ll be interesting to see if ‘caseophile’ overtakes the word from the Greek…”

Our friend Greg is one of the best eaters we know. (If you had grown up eating his mom’s food, you’d know why.) He keeps us in the loop about the food scene in Birmingham and, on several occasions there, has been our guide on multi-course lunches, each course coming from a different local hole-in-the-wall.

Greg also forwards us interesting food-related articles and news. Last month, he forwarded us a column by Raymond Sokolov from the Wall Street Journal. The author of The Cook’s Canon: 101 Classic Recipes Everyone Should Know, Sokolov writes the WSJ’s “Eating Out” column.

In his June 28 column, he wrote of his trek through 12 states “to assess the state of our barbecue nation.” (An interactive map of barbecue joints is also online.) He tipped a few sacred cows in Kansas City and Tennessee, and even took a shot at Bob’s Big Boy in northern Alabama, all before coming to the conclusion that a beef smokehouse in Texas was his favorite.

The problem with writing 1000 (or 10,000) words on the state of the barbecue nation is that you’re stuck surveying the big names in the field, the places listed in the guidebooks. In response, the barbecue geeks come out and let you know just how much of a chump you are.

Sokolov’s no chump, though. Yesterday, he followed up on his original column with another entitled “Where Ribs are an Art Form”, this one focused entirely on a few barbecue joints in the Birmingham/Tuscaloosa area of Alabama.

As his tour guide, Sokolov found a Greg of his own, an aphoristic guy named Charles Perry who, in his correspondence with Sokolov, “rose to remarkable heights of eloquence in praise of his region’s hickory-smoked ribs.” (Outside Archibald’s, a “real mythic Q shack” across the street from a pallet factory in Northport, Perry quipped, “You know the barbecue is good if the woodpile is bigger than the restaurant.”)

Flipping the broad scope of his original column on its head, Sokolov concludes in Alabama that “like politics in Tip O’Neill’s dictum, all barbecue is local. It’s a performance art enacted by one pitmaster, with a specific combination of setting, ingredients, goals, customers.”

I’ve got a suggestion for a follow-up to this barbecue follow-up: Almost a quarter of a century ago, Sokolov wrote a short essay in Natural History magazine in which he noted that “for Americans particularly, food that still looks like the animal it came from is often cause for (irrational) disgust.”

I love ribs and barbecue pork, but it’s always bothered me that so many barbecue restaurants use a cartoonish pig in their signage. (The pig is often smiling, which makes it even worse.) Is there something creepy about using the image of a pig in barbecue logos? Does it make us feel better about our carnivorous habits to pretend that the animal we’re eating is pleased that we’re eating it? Or am I just another irrationally squeamish American? Either way, I think Sokolov’s anthropological inclinations would him an excellent candidate to pursue this topic in a future column.

Yesterday in Oakland, I picked up Alone in the Kitchen with Eggplant to read during my long flight to New York. (It seemed like appropriate reading for the day the eggplant root source went out.) An anthology named after an essay by Laurie Colwin, it has entries from, among others, Haruki Murakami, Dan Chaon and Ann Patchett. I never got around to actually reading anything yesterday, but I’m going to start with Murakami’s essay on spaghetti. Has anybody read anything from it?

This week I’ve been playing with variations on classic ratatouille. (We’ll have the recipe in this week’s root source.)

It’s essentially a vegetable ragout (or quick stew) with Provençal roots, made with onions, garlic, eggplant, zucchini, bell peppers, tomatoes and parsley, rosemary or thyme. Since I had some left over in the fridge this morning, I decided to work it into a fritatta for breakfast.

First I preheated the broiler. In a small bowl, I whisked together 3 eggs and seasoned them lightly with salt and pepper. I heated a splash of olive oil in a small nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. When the oil was hot and shimmering, I added the eggs.

I shook the pan and stirred the eggs until curds began to form. When the fritatta came together and released from the bottom of the pan, I added a few spoonfuls of ratatouille and topped it with freshly grated parmesan. I slid the pan underneath the broiler until the top was brown in spots, about 2 minutes.

The leftover ratatouille was as good in a frittata as it would be tossed with pasta, thinned with chicken stock for soup, or spooned over a good slice of grilled crusty bread.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve received a ton of email about cookthink.com. Thanks to all of you who have written to report bugs, detail odd search results, suggest features and, in general, tell us how much you love (or hate) the new site. We’re really proud of what we’ve built and are excited to build it out with your help. Your comments have been incredibly helpful as we work on the search algorithm and finetune the new features we’ll release in the coming weeks and months.

As Claire mentioned back in June (as all of you who have searched for “chocolate” in the “cookthink it” tool have noticed), we have no desserts at cookthink.com. Many people have asked when we’ll add desserts. We usually respond with “soon” by which we mean “we’re not really sure.” We want to get our savory business in order before we move on to the sweets. But, for the record, it’s painful for us, too, to have all this beautiful summer fruit out there but no recipes that use them.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, I got an email from “Jen” wondering why she couldn’t find any recipes to use for the big container of fresh strawberries she had in the refrigerator. Like I’d done a bunch of times already, I emailed her back and explained that while we didn’t have any dessert recipes yet, we would have them “soon.”

Jen’s response was a good, humbling reminder of how awesomely varied the realm of the recipes is. She thanked me for getting back to her and told me to check out the recipe she’d found for her strawberries (which she’d pasted in the email).

The recipe (taken from a June issue of New York magazine) was for Spaghetti With Strawberries, a signature savory dish at Sfoglia, a restaurant with outposts on Nantucket and in Manhattan. Jen said it had been delicious, and I believe her. I’m going to make it this weekend for a day-long feast that’s in the works. (More on that later.)

I’ll be coming to the feast with sacks of stone fruit fresh from central California. Can anyone recommend a good savory dish that calls for peaches, plums or nectarines? (Despite my past vilification of fruit sauces, I’m open even to them.) Thanks.

For an early, quick Friday evening dinner, I swirled some pesto on a few pieces of folded-over lavash, then layered each one with thinly sliced tomatoes, crumbled goat cheese and a few white beans.

I put the pizzas directly on the middle rack of a preheated 450F oven (with foil on the rack below to catch spills), and baked them until they were crisp, about 10 minutes.

Since the lavash is so thin, and since I added the toppings sparingly (less moisture), the pizzas got beautifully crisp in a hot oven.

I’m in the Fresno, California area for the next week, doing research for my book on the pluot. Yesterday, I saw Flavor Queens for the first time in a long time.

I have a special attachment to Flavor Queen, as it was the first pluot I ever had and is pretty much the reason I’m writing the book. I ate an overripe Queen at an L.A. farmers market and was awed. I thought: “I need to know everything I can know about this.” More later.

Last night, after testing basil recipes all week for today’s root source, I had enough basil left over to make a classic pesto.

I was in the mood for something quick and simple. I boiled some whole wheat linguine in salted water until it was al dente, lifted it from the water with tongs, held it above the pot to drain, and tossed it in a big bowl with three heaping spoonfuls of pesto.

The earthiness of the whole wheat pasta balanced the pesto’s richness. It was a good day’s end meal alongside a chilled glass of Grüner Veltliner.

Yesterday, Chip and I spent a long time debating where to draw the line between a relish and a salad. We finally agreed that the distinction lies somewhere at the intersection of how finely chopped the ingredients are (though there are chopped salads) and whether, when assembled, they’re more likely to stand alone as a side dish (salad) or act more like a condiment (relish).

We both love the simple caprese salad and were interested to see how it would do as a condiment on vegetable burgers or a simple grilled steak.

When dinner rolled around last night, I still had a little of the salad left over from the afternoon root source photo shoot. I was craving a sandwich, so I piled a handful of the caprese relish inside a warmed piece of pita bread. I doctored with it with some halved black olives, a little red wine vinegar and some extra black pepper.

Relish. Salad. Whatever it was, it was damn good.