This post is just a quick announcement to share two pieces of blog-related news that I hope you might find interesting!

Meet Rand!
First, that handsome guy in the photo above is my younger brother Rand, who’s been an important part of my blog from the early days. Not only is he the one who inspired me to start this blog in the first place, but for years Rand made charming blog headers that changed every month, and helped with other nice graphics touches on the site.

And in the early days, Rand even posted several fun recipes on the blog, although the measuring and writing down all the recipe steps required by food blogging makes his right brain ache a bit! 

When I decided to go with a permanent header, and through several subsequent re-designs of the site, Rand has been the design genius who oversees all the color choices, graphics, and design touches that make my blog look good. And truthfully, most of what he’s done probably hasn’t gotten the credit it deserved. I do know that several of my blogging friends wish they could adopt him as a brother!

For years Rand had a successful career in advertising, and you probably saw some of his ads on television or in magazines, but a few years ago he decided he’d had enough of the corporate ad agency lifestyle and started on a more free-spirited career path. That means he has more time to do fun projects for me, which I couldn’t be more excited about, and the timing is perfect because I’ve been struggling to find a better work-life balance myself. 

Although I’m lucky to have Jake and Kara who help me test the recipes, Danica's Kitchen has always been pretty much a one-woman show. That was fine for a long time, but now blogging involves so much time-consuming social media that it’s hard to keep up without spending your life sitting at the computer. So I’m excited that Rand is going to be helping out with social media, and in fact for month’s he’s been making those amazing drop-dead gorgeous Pins you see if you’re following me on Pinterest, and he also was the brains behind the recent day-long Facebook countdown of the Top Ten Most Popular Low-Carb Zucchini Recipes. 

I’m sure Rand is going to have more fun ideas in the future, so welcome Rand; it’s going to be fun working with you even more. (And maybe I can even talk him into doing a recipe now and then, who knows?)

A New Commitment to Meatless Monday!
The other piece of news is that after neglecting Meatless Monday for quite a while now, I’m going to re-commit to sharing a recipe for Meatless Monday every week. Rand had something to do with this too, because he’s been a most-of-the-time vegetarian for years now, and talking with him made me realize how much I had abandoned my Meatless Monday posts on this blog.

It was not something I intended to stop doing because I was still making meatless recipes quite often, but once I was no longer writing a weekly Meatless Monday post at BlogHer.com, it was easy to forget spotlighting them in a Meatless Monday post each week. And truthfully, as I got more and more focused on lower-carb cooking, it sometimes felt hard to come up with a meatless recipe idea that was low in carbs. 

But I’ve decided I can definitely commit to featuring a meatless dish of some kind every Sunday night or Monday morning, even if sometimes it’s not a main dish recipe. And if I don’t have a new low-carb meatless recipe to share I’ll spotlight one of my meatless favorites that you might have missed!

If you’re a vegetarian reader who’s happy about that bit of Meatless Monday news, there are lots of great meatless recipe ideas on the Meatless Recipes Index Page or the Vegan Recipes Index Page.  (If you don’t see the recipe thumbnails when you visit those pages, refresh to make them show up! Sorry about that; we’re working on fixing it.)

And if you’re really enthusiastic about Meatless Monday, you can find over 15,000 meatless recipes from bloggers all around the web on my Meatless Mondays Pinterest Board! That’s definitely a board to follow if you’re not already doing so. 

And if any vegetarian eaters or Meatless Monday fans have requests for a certain type of meatless low-carb recipe or ingredient you’d like me to experiment with and feature here, let me know about that in the comments!

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