Who is/was the Saucy Gander?
- May 5
- 6 min read
"Hey guys I made stuff, Hey guys I saw stuff - Stuff - the stuff of legends and food blogs." Saucy Gander
This began as a post about a food blog that had caught my eye - Saucy Gander - and, of course, it has morphed into a ramble around the net and its tiny corners, as well as a 'review' of a food blog.
In my little Ideas notebook sitting on my desk I have one section devoted to blogs that have caught my eye for one reason or another. Some of them are huge with millions of followers, some are of moderate success - all the way down to tiny ones like mine. There must be millions of them if you only knew where to look. Especially the tiny ones, because we don't do all the SEO and Google stuff that would get us more readers. Mostly I suspect because we can't be bothered and because we are not doing this to make millions of dollars.
Having now read a few things about blogging from this website - which I shall come to shortly I now realise that as well as the titles of these blogs I should also be writing down why I noted them. Because when I come to write about them - especially the little hidden ones - I can never remember what it was about them that caught my eye - or even when. For the list is long and I am only about halfway through it. Besides I'm adding names all the time.
The picture of the author above - deliberately blurry I feel - is the only picture on the site appearing beside a brief paragraph about her:
"Adventuress in the kitchen and beyond. Amateur cook, baker, traveller, occasional dinner party hostess. I read copiously, blog unprofessionally, and eat almost incessantly. I am an un-trendy resident of Sydney inner west, have never eaten a cake pop, and don't have a DSLR."
From which we learn female and Australian. Having now read a few more of her posts I now also know that she has/had a husband - sad that one has to add the questioning 'had' these days. Also that at some point she must have studied law and was possibly working as a lawyer because she and a friend were planning to travel to Bolivia where they would write a blog called Two Lawyers and a Llama - but then she also mentioned somewhere that she had an English major. There is no name and so no way to know what happened or what she is doing now.
The blog seems to have run from 2012 to 2014 - the last post was in August of that year - when travelling in Myanmar (Burma), and, again, as I have discovered when writing about 'dead' blogs - no intimation of why that was the last post. One is left wondering whether life simply got in the way - a baby perhaps, the writer became bored with the whole thing or some catastrophe happened. I hope it didn't. At least it had nothing to do with COVID - much too early.
Having climbed to a temple on a high hill her last post ends with these words, and this photograph:
"And at the top of the hill, we – and the tribe of monkeys – were walking among clouds."
You could write a novel from there - if you were able to write a novel of course.
So what kind of blog is it?
Part travel and part food, a simple Wordpress website with a simple logo, and in spite of its small size a few ads scattered through the text. Which is annoying - you never know whether you have come to the end of the post or not. Nice photographs though - and since she has no DLSR (I do, but no longer use it much) - then taken on a phone. Well why not, these days they take pretty good photographs? It's the eye not the camera that matters,
The writing is chatty, informal, mildly amusing and often thoughtful and informative. The recipes are not just presented with at the most a very few technical notes. No, as in this recipe for Not quite poutine meets vegemite for example beginning with the thought of Australia Day and vegemite and a brief preamble about vegemite she goes on to an amusing sort of bulleted list of how the recipe came to be-
"think vegemite –>
mmm cheese –>
ok think vegemite –>
cheesy polenta chips –>
ok, let’s think vegemite –> ......"
And it actually looks good.
In a way I suppose her aims are similar to my own
"Here is another blog on cooking and eating. This is where I write about learning in the kitchen, experiments in smell, colour, texture and taste, and the fun of cooking for large groups of friends. In a small way, this is also travelling through a kitchen and cookbooks."
So I wandered around her pages a little and then found this - A writing process, a blog frolic, and a favourites list which led me down another internet side alley to the Liebster Award for which she had been nominated.
So what is the Liebster Award? Well AI calls it ad hoc - which it does indeed seem to be. There is no organisation that controls this. Somewhere I saw it being described as a one of those letters you used to get, where you had to pass it on to five people - or something like that.
Anyway somebody who has already been nominated for the award, has to nominate a further 10 blogs for awards. If you are nominated, here is the list of what you have to do. The award is intended for very small sites - less than 200 followers it says here, although I have seen a more recent number of 1000 and also the number of nominations and questions seems to vary from 5 to 11.
It's an interesting idea and a rather nice support system for the unknown bloggers of the world - although as one responder said - they found it hard to come up with 10 names, because these blogs are indeed tiny, and therefore hidden - and this person knew mostly of only the large well-known blogs. One section of Goosey Gander's replies - about her writing process rang bells with me - which is perhaps why I am writing about her now - although not how I discovered her - that must have been a recipe. Here is some of what she says:
"Some days, a dish names itself and a blog post sort of happens around that name (like bird seed bread, badass chilli cheese bread). Sometimes, I try out a new technique or recipe, and have a lot of technical notes that I want to record on the blog (like making brioche, or croissant). Or, I find or remember a poem that is tangentially related to the recipe, and my inner English major does a little tappy toe gig.
Other days, I spend a bit of time looking at a blank screen, until an unrelated story comes to mind, and then it becomes a challenge to link the story back to the recipe, or not."
There is more. If you are interested.
And what about the name of her website? It's quite clever really. A gander is, of course, a mature male goose which gives you a foodie connection - as does saucy. But gander also means a quick look - or more explicitly:
"The slang sense of gander comes from the meaning recorded in 1886, to take a long look by craning one's neck like a goose, or wander foolishly (again, like a goose)." Vocabulary.com
Quick look, long look, wander ...
Or you could go back to the nursery rhyme which begins: "Goosey goosey gander, Whither shall I wander? Upstairs and downstairs ..." And saucy denotes a certain sense of carefree style and the two together combine to give us wandering in both the literal and literary sense.
So I hope she is continuing to wander in every sense of the word - happily, even excitedly, and that she has found something better to do with her time than creating
"one of those existential puzzles about the sound of one keyboard tapping to nothingness – !" Saucy Gander
YEARS GONE BY
May 5
2024 - Nothing
2023 - A book and a cook
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2019 - Nothing
...and in My Lady's Chamber.. thus the source: of the "Saucy Gander". Wooee! 😜