Jaden Hair, food blogger and CL alum, publishes Steamy Kitchen Cookbook

I first met Jaden (rhymnes with "maiden") Hair two years ago, in the drizzled, muddy parking lot of an organic farm stand. She came to my attention thanks to her blog -- steamykitchen.com -- which had hit the local scene a mere six months before and had already garnered a national following; and she brought Spam fried rice to the CL Sarastoa offices just because we commented on her site.

The two of us bought produce, hit the grocery store for seafood, then retired to a teaching kitchen at the now defunct Chef's Table in Sarasota, where she whipped up Seared Scallops with Mango-Melon Salsa & Coconut Rice for our $20 Menu Challenge. I didn't write about it then, but the scallops didn't have a good sear, the rice was undercooked and the kitchen, by the end, was an unholy mess. A week later, I asked her to write a recipe column for CL.

Jaden has never been a restaurant chef, and never went to cooking school. Until just a couple of years before she started steamykitchen.com, in January of 2007, she wasn't even much of a home cook.

That's part of Jaden's charm. She's approachable, a mother and wife, an amateur, and her blog combines stunning photography, dishes made for home cooks, and engaging personal stories. "I decided that the blog was just a recipe database and a journal, so I kept my voice the way it is," says Jaden. "I was able to say exactly what I wanted to say -- no editor, no boss. Who knew readers loved that?"

That's a well-known recipe for success in the crowded world of food blogs, but it took relentless drive and a gift for self-promotion to make the transition to real world cooking celebrity in under two years. Her first book -- The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook -- hit shelves this month.

When I sat down with Jaden recently, she downplayed that self-promotion. In the early days of her blog, she started visiting other food sites and commenting, "but it was never for the purpose of getting people to go to my site," she says. "People can smell that across the Internet, I just wanted to join this community. These people became my friends."

On Twitter, her followers number over 25,000. On steamykitchen.com, that extended family translates into almost a half-million hits each month. Jaden is good at making friends.

By the summer of 2007, Jaden had contacted a local Sarasota newspaper -- the East County Observer -- and convinced them to let her write an occasional recipe column; she also started teaching local classes at The Chef's Table. "Six months after I started the blog, I decided this would be an awesome business, I wanted to do this," she explains. "I made a business plan -- which I never read again -- then got a poster board, a lot of magazines, and pulled out words and colors that caught my eye. That became my business plan."

That's when I met her, and immediately co-opted her for the weekly recipe column. Her final column for CL was in early 2008, a Dear John letter explaining why she had to move on to a bigger (if not necessarily better) gig at the Tampa Tribune: "He's older, more mature, and, sigh ... has a bigger masthead." Size matters, to Jaden -- even though, when writing for larger, more mainstream publications, she would no longer be able to refer to coconuts as "hair twats."

That's also when she started appearing regularly on Sarasota and Bay area television shows, along with frequent appearances on Daytime, a nationally syndicated chat show produced in Tampa. Steamykitchen.com was producing a healthy income and her numbers were strong. Enough for some people, maybe, but Jaden had loftier goals.

In early 2008, Jaden was contacted by an editor at Tuttle Publishing, who'd been tipped off by a relative who'd read one of her columns in CL (you're welcome, Jaden). After months of negotiations, she had a book deal, and two new hats to wear -- cookbook author and professional photographer.

Although the food porn pictures on steamykitchen.com had been a draw for readers almost from the beginning, Jaden was as clueless about photography as she was about cooking. "For the first year, I used my digital Rebel with all automatic settings," she says. "I was able to still take good pictures because I paid attention to it." Her formula for success? Lots of natural light, and 60-100 shots of each dish.

Since she was known for her photography, she wanted to keep control of that when it came to the Steamy Kitchen Cookbook. "The six months I had to work on the book all by myself, all I did was practice practice practice," Jaden explains. "I would send pics to them [the editors] and they would print them out and say this is why the pic sucks. Back then they did suck. They were good Web quality, but not cookbook quality." Like cooking, writing, internet marketing, television production, HTML and CSS, though, she was up to the task of learning on the fly.

When the first batch of books arrived at her house last month, she ignored it. "It sat in the box for four hours before I opened it, with that nervous giddy scared butterfly feeling," Jaden laughs. "He [husband Scott] videotaped me opening it, looking at it for the first time, then here comes my kid -- fully clothed, with a mask and snorkel on. Back down to reality."

Success at last, in a more concrete form than monthly pageviews and unique visitors? Kind of. Jaden shrugs when I ask her how much money she'll make if the book is a hit. She hired her own publicist to augment the efforts of the small publishing house, and says, "In the end I'll probably lose money on this cookbook. If there's anyone who wants to make money writing cookbooks, you'll probably be out of luck."

Two years ago, Jaden claimed that one of her dreams was to be on the Food Network. She's met with them, and has a producer working on show ideas, but seems nonchalant about the whole thing now. There's the book to promote, a new gig writing for Discovery/TLC's website, and a giant group of Internet friends to maintain.

When I tell Jaden that I can't imagine her slowing down, she smiles, but obviously doesn't agree. "The Food Network, or any national television show where I'd have a boss, I don't know how my life would change, how busy I'd get," she says. "I kind of would like to keep it like this for a while. What I do now is awesome."