Blogger Spotlight - Season with Spice

This week we are catching up with Mark and Reese from their blog ‘Season with Spice’. The colorful dishes on the blog are influenced by midwest and southeast asian cuisine, making for bold and flavorful creations. With inspiration from a historical spice trail in Malaysia, this intercontinental foodie duo has a unique story behind their blog.

Posted by: Angie Rizzo

Where are you located?  

We recently moved from Penang, Malaysia (Reese’s home) to Minnesota (Mark’s home)

What inspired you to start blogging and how long have been doing it?

For the three years we were living in Penang, we worked as consultants on many community & arts projects in the UNESCO World Heritage site of George Town. One of those projects included the development of a local spice trail, which gave us a better understanding of the cultural, historical, environmental, and culinary value of spices. From that experience, we wanted to learn more and cook more with spices, which ultimately led to the development of Season with Spice in April 2011.

About how often do you post to your blog?  

Right now we are posting a recipe, or a spice related article, once a week.

Do you have a unique style in terms of your blogging and/or cooking?

Because colors represent spices, our site and images tend to be more colorful.  An easy task when we were living on the tropical island of Penang during the first two years of Season with Spice, but a little more challenging during a Minnesota winter!   

What are you doing when you are not food blogging?

 We are spending most of our time right now working on our new business - an organic spice shop called Season with Spice - which will be launched in March 2013.

What kind of food did you grow up eating and how did it influence your taste preference today?

(Reese) I grew up in Penang - a melting pot of Chinese, Indian, Malay, Thai, Indonesian, and other Asian food influences - so I always had an adventurous palate to explore foods from around the world.  

(Mark) I grew up on a steady diet of Minnesota dishes, but spent most of my adult life in Asia - living in Malaysia, Japan, India, and Singapore.  It was tough at first on a sheltered Midwest guy like me, turning my head to ingredients like fermented shrimp paste, but now I can’t get enough of it.

 Based purely on cuisine, which country do you most want to visit?

We would both love to visit countries in the Mediterranean to explore all those wonderful seafood dishes. 

What are your least favorite foods?  

Pink slime!

 How do you decide which dishes to blog about? Do you follow a theme or overarching concept in your blogging?

Our recipes always have at least one spice or herb, and tend to be Asian or Asian-inspired dishes.

Gooey or crunchy?  

Crunchy.

If you could choose your last meal, what would it be?  

Seafood buffet!

What do you find the most challenging about blogging? e.g. Finding content, photography, writing?

Photographing your lunch when you’re hungry

What blogs do you follow?

Just One Cookbook,  Rasa Malaysia , Something Edible, Wok with Ray, and MJ’s Kitchen.

All images via: Season with Spice