At first glance, www.dirtykitchensecrets.com sounds like the sort of website that would see most Middle East visitors instantly greeted with a friendly ‘this site is blocked’ message from their local Internet provider. Despite its suggestive name, however, Dirty Kitchen Secrets has had the tongues of thousands lolling for purely innocent reasons. The brainchild of Lebanese-American Bethany Kehdy, this highly-regarded food blog has quickly become one of the best online resources for Lebanese cuisine, with hundreds of tried and tested recipes, detailed descriptions of the key ingredients in Lebanese dishes and even videos of the chef herself cooking from her kitchen in Brighton, UK.
And what began as simply an online extension of Kehdy’s ever-expanding word document of recipes has now become a full-time job, with various other food-related projects spinning off from the website.
“It all happened one night,” says Kehdy, just back from one of the Taste of Lebanon tours she now organises. “I came across the food blog aaplemint.com and thought ‘I can’t believe you can publish online’. Yes, it was a little tardy, but I was so inspired and spent the next 24 hours reading up on the world of blogging and set up DKS the following night.”
This was back in 2008, shortly after Bethany moved to the UK after spells in Hawaii, Miami, Montreal and Dubai. Born in Houston, she was raised in Lebanon and remembers her father setting up a farm on ancestral land after the family had moved to the mountains during the civil war. “For a great part of my childhood I helped to water orchards, harvest fruits and vegetables, chase after chickens, make cheese and even milk the odd cow.”
A year after setting up Dirty Kitchen Secrets, with the financial crisis catching up with her and the company she worked for shutting down, Kehdy thought it was the right moment to put her heart and soul into it. “I decided now was the time to go for it. I put a together a business plan and never looked back, except for a few times when I thought I’d lost my mind!”
Working on the blog soon helped convince Kehdy what it was she wanted to do in life. “It wasn’t that I thought I had something good with the blog, but more that the blog had worked to confirm that I wanted to pursue a career in food because that was where I felt most inspired. And if I could also help build positive a Middle Eastern image, then for me I’d hit the jackpot.”
And now, just two years on, the website is boasting between 10,000 and 60,000 visitors a month, and has helped establish Kehdy as a full-time food writer, recipe developer and all-round guru of Lebanese cuisine. It’s also helped highlight another of her skills, that of a food photographer, with colourful snaps of her tasty-looking creations brightening up the website’s pages.
She’s not the only food blogger out there by a long shot, with thousands having taken to the internet to spread word of their culinary obsessions. But with DKS she’s still managing to keep her site unique in an increasingly crowded workplace. “Lebanese/Middle Eastern cuisine is very unique in itself – there is still a great deal that is not known about it. It’s not all mezze, you know.”
And now it’s other food bloggers that Kehdy is now looking to cater for with another side of her business. In 2009 she launched Food Blogger Connect, Europe’s first and biggest food blogging conference. Celebrating its third event this August, Food Blogger Connect aims to bring together food bloggers and writers from all over the world, providing a useful resource and forum for all thing food blog related. Among the guest speakers are award winning bloggers, journalists, critics, photographers and editors, each passing on their advice, right from setting up a blog, to finding a niche, to the watching the stats with the likes of Google Analytics. “I founded Food Blog Connect because there was a real lack of support and community for food bloggers in the UK and Europe,” says Kehdy, adding that this year’s conference will be the biggest yet.
And there are also her Taste of Lebanon tours, which Kehdy arranges twice a year in conjunction with the Lebanese Ministry of Tourism. These culinary journeys see food fans invited into people’s homes across the country to learn the authentic techniques behind such specialities as kebbeh, baklawa and Arabic bread along with trips to olive groves, vineyards and wild za’atar fields.
“The next tour is going to be turned into a documentary,” says Kehdy. “These trips are the most exciting things for me as I’ve always been compelled to change any one-dimensional opinion of Lebanon.”
For Kehdy, what started out as a simple method of publishing her recipes online has turned into a full-blown business, with the cook/writer/photographer among the pack-leaders in the increasingly powerful food blogging community. With her website, along with her number of side-projects steadily growing, it’s likely Kehdy’s kitchen might remain dirty for some time.
www.dirtykitchensecrets.com
