F is for...first post!

Hi everyone!

Ok, well this a new experience me, the first post in my (or should I say our) shiny new blog. I’ve never written a blog before so im finding this kind of odd but I do have a diary and I imagine that’s kind of the same thing? Not that Id let anyone read my diary of course!
Anyway my name is Lyndsey and I’m creating this blog as part of a project with my flatmate and friend, Tina. Were in our second year of a media production course at De Montfort University in Leicester. This blog is part of a web 2.0 project were creating but I hope it evolves to be something much more than that because there are many interesting elements to this project!

The basic idea is that over the course of 26 days, Tina and I create a meal, each one beginning with a different letter of the alphabet, from A all the way down to Z. These meals must be prepared by ourselves, not the local pizza hut or a ready meal from Iceland! Having recipes ranging from A to Z is an added stipulation to encourage us to try things we’d never normally eat (Z’s certainly gonna be a tricky one!) and since I’m scared of any vegetables except a cucumber and a onion, this should be beneficial to my health and my diet!

Now for someone whos idea of gourmet dining is a Pot Noodle and a recently diagnosed sufferer of IBS, the hope is that this change in diet will see an improvement in my condition as I will be consuming nutrients not provided by the endless amounts of fast food and takeaway I usually consume. Also, IBS sufferers are told to keep a food diary to see which foods effect them the most. Ive never actually done this so the results of this experiment will be very interesting I think!

The project is far more complex than that though. Understanding blogs and online communication is the key aspect of this project. How can we keep this blog interesting for our readers? What other forms of Web 2.0 can we branch out in to encourage reader participation? Well I can tell you we’ve just created a new Facebook group. Avid Facebook user though I may be, creating a group is another new experience for me! Basic though this group undoubtedly is, hopefully it will provide a lot of interesting feedback; feel free to leave us comments and interesting recipe suggestions!

Were also going to be looking at just how easy it is for a student to eat healthily these days, how much do fresh meals cost in comparison to the delights of the ready meal? Is there enough variety of food shops around the DMU campus to allow us to buy some of the more exotic ingredients needed for certain recipes? How useful are the food recipe websites compared with the more traditional student cookbooks and will the health benefits this of this experiment be worth the extra effort? Well I guess we’ll soon find out over the course of this blog!