Blog roll please . . .

Yes, yes, we know -- our blog roll up till now has been, well, kind of pathetic. Thank you to those bloggers who have taken us to task for it. You were right! So we at the L.A. Times Food section have put our heads together and compiled a much more comprehensive one. Certainly it just scratches the surface of the incredible wealth of terrific L.A.-centric food blogs. Blogs like the Delicious Life, spotlighting Sarah Gim's wonderful writing. Or Monster Munching, focusing with verve on dining and cooking in Orange County. Or Rameniac, where you'll want to go for all things ramen. (Did you know there are 22 popular ramen styles in Japan? Rameniac parses them all.)

It all starts with the beginning of our roll of L.A. food blogs (it's on the right rail; scroll down to find it). That's the place to find important must-check blogs such as Eater L.A., the Knife and more. Click on "More delicious links" and you'll find the rest of that list (we're still tweaking -- we're missing a couple of category headers), then L.A. food sites; more food blogs, such as Epi-blog (Epicurious' group blog), the Grinder (Chow's food media blog) and the Wednesday Chef. Then L.A. Food sites, including resources such as Yelp, Slow Food L.A. and the county Department of Public Health site for restaurant grades.

We hope our expanded links list will make it easy for you to find all things delicious in one spot. If we missed a blog or site you love or rely on, please let us know by posting a comment. We may be slow in getting it up (the L.A. Times has a very busy tech department!) but we'll do our best.

Whew!

-- Leslie Brenner

American Italian online

We all know American Italian food is not quite the same as Italian Italian. For instance, Italians could afford more meat in this country, so they adapted the old-country dish eggplant parmesan to make chicken parmesan. Other dishes created here include cioppino, clams casino, chicken piccata (in fact, practically the entire chicken repertoire, because chicken had rarely been eaten in Italy) and even spaghetti with meatballs -- traditionally, meatballs had been served separately from pasta. Shock of shocks, the ubiquitous pasta primavera was invented by the Italian owner of a New York French restaurant, Le Cirque.

In 2004, a writer named Skip Lombardi published a book on this subject, "Almost Italian," which included scores of these classic American Italian dishes. He's bringing out a new edition right now -- on his blog. Two or three passages have been appearing per week. So far they've been from the historical introduction, but recipes will be coming soon. This might be the first cookbook ever to be serialized recipe by recipe in blog form.

Lombardi welcomes blog viewers to offer their own comments, stories and, of course, recipes. So if you have Italian roots, here's your chance to bring your heritage to the public.

-- Charles Perry