Geek of the Week: Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars

Meet my good friend Marisa McClellan. A celebrated blogger (and now a published author!), Marisa runs the wildly popular Food in Jars blog, where she teaches the Internet how to make delicious canned nibbles.
Yesterday Marisa’s book, Food in Jars: Preserving in Small Batches Year-Round, hit stores everywhere via Running Press, a lovely publisher here in Philadelphia. The book is fantastic, the photography is beautiful, and you should absolutely pick it up immediately.
Seriously. Do it now. Here’s a link to Amazon. You’re welcome.
In honor of her book release, Marisa’s our Geek of the Week. Enjoy, and make sure you visit her blog at foodinjars.com.
1. What made you decide to launch Food in Jars? Why canning?
I started Food in Jars in early 2009 because my job as the editor of Slashfood (AOL’s now-defunct food blog) was ending and I wanted to stay in the food blogging world. I grew up canning with my mom and have been entirely obsessed with jars for years, so it was something that was always part of my life. At the time, there weren’t really any blogs out there dealing with canning, so I figured it would be a good niche for me. At the time though, I had no idea that canning would effectively become my career.
2. A lot of times when a blog lands a book deal, we see those blogs go quiet, start updating less. You? You don’t stop. How did you find a balance between writing on the blog, pursuing your other writing interests, and working on your cookbook?
To my mind, it was never an option to stop writing the blog while writing my book. One of the reasons that I got the opportunity to write the book was that I had an engaged community of readers. A large part of my value as an author was that audience. I had to continue to feed that relationship and develop that community so that there would be people welcoming the book when it was finally released. So I kept writing.
I will say that the summer of 2010 was really hard, because that’s when I was developing all the recipes for my book and was still working full time. I spent all my free time canning and making sure all the recipes for the book worked, while also continuing to invent stuff for the blog. It wasn’t so much about balance as it was general brute force.











