In March, the Washington Post pulled the plug on Kim O’Donnel’s long-time chat, What’s Cooking. Today, O’Donnel announced on her daily Post food blog that she herself is pulling the plug on A Mighty Appetite, effective on Friday.

The announcement officially ends O’Donnel’s 12-year run at the Post, the last three as the Mighty Appetite blogger.

The veteran food writer, now based in Seattle, won’t be without a home for long, however. On Wednesday, July 15, O’Donnel will launch her new column/blog, “Licking Your Chops,” on the online start-up, True/Slant, an innovative media business in which “Entrepreneurial Journalists” can brand themselves and drum up advertisers to sponsor their work (for which the writers receive a cut of the revenue).

O’Donnel is interested in the branding side of True/Slant more than the self-marketing side. In fact, she doesn’t plan to sell advertisers on her work. She instead will earn a stipend, which she labels a “big pay cut.”

The branding side of the equation is important to O’Donnel as she expands her freelance empire. She’s already hosting a new cooking chat at Culinate.com, and she’s close to signing a deal to publish her debut cookbook, which she describes as a “meatless guide for meat lovers.” It’ll include 52 separate meat-free menus, one for each week, so that “Mr. and Mrs. Sausage [can] take a pass one day a week,” she tells Y&H. It’s based on O’Donnel’s Meatless Monday series, which she launched last fall.

Read More “Food Blogger Kim O’Donnel Is Leaving WaPo for True/Slant” »

Or back online. Whatever the case, Kim O’Donnel, former host of the ‘What’s Cooking’ chat on washingtonpost.com, will start dropping knowledge (god, I’m so dated) now at Culinate.com. Her debut is today at 1 p.m. EDT.

Since unceremoniously losing her post.com gig last month, O’Donnel had been hosting a makeshift chat on facebook for the most die-hard of her fans. The Culinate site should make it easier again for O’Donnel to interface (didn’t I say I was dated?) with home cooks who need a little help in the kitchen. For starters, they won’t need a facebook account (although, really, with 200 million members, doesn’t everyone have an account now?). Second, Culinate will alert you to O’Donnel’s weekly chats—for the price of your personal e-mail.

Read More “O’Donnel Is Back on the Air Today with ‘Table Talk’” »

Well, that didn’t take long.

On Tuesday, Kim O’Donnel hosted her final What’s Cooking chat for washingtonpost.com, drawing a number of cries and exclamations from home cooks who had come to rely on her culinary expertise for the past ten years. Today, O’Donnel told Y&H that her chat will be renamed and relaunched next month: Table Talk will debut at 1 p.m. EDT on Thursday, April 9, on Culinate.com.

Culinate is a privately owned site, based in Portland, Ore., with a wealth of food-related content, from basic recipes to interviews to buying guides and beyond. O’Donnel did a freelance piece for the site last summer and found herself attracted to its work. “I was just admiring from afar what they were doing,” O’Donnel says. “It’s kind of a perfect fit.”

Read More “Kim O’Donnel’s Cooking Chat Resurfaces at Culinate.com” »