I spent the last twenty-five years blogging and making videos. Half of that was dedicated to recipes and food themed movies. This morning, I had to ask myself why I decided to move on from every aspect of my last two and a half decades? You know what I said to myself...fear. I fear doing it all again and getting stuck never advancing in my life. I had some bad experiences because of being a blogger. Labeling myself a blogger. Getting trapped in the mindset that -that was all I could be. No, I was never just a blogger, I have always been a writer, a journalist, a creator, a show host, an artist and even an entertainer. But I have never been just a blogger. I never in all those years ever got a dime for anything I ever put out online. Never monetized, never sponsored, never part of a paid collaboration. Everything I ever put online was because I was needing something to do. Something to fill the void.
This morning I started to think about the recipes. How can I take the past formula I used to do for my food related posts and put a fresh spin on it? I ended up spending over an hour and a half looking through my old recipe posts just counting how many I've done over the few years. Nearly 90. None of them particularly great. But for me, it was never about how great the photos were, or even how great a chef I could be. It was about the journey. The why of it.
My method was to watch whatever movie or show I was tasked to pull from or inspired by, and write down every scrap of food seen or talked about, to draw from the wardrobe or the character's attitude. To read between the lines of the novels and stories and find the common ingredients.
Somewhere along the way I got lost. I started off not being able to cook a lick, to actually making impossible recipes semi-well, to getting super lazy and barely phoning it in. I lived through my food. I failed through the very material I was supposed to be inspired by.
But isn't that life? We succeed, we fail, we get back up most of the time. but we learn from everything, good and bad. It's how we grow.
What conclusions did I come to this morning? The past is the past, and even if you've made a recipe a hundred times the same way, it's never the same because you're never the same person. And my 2023 chili recipe is a hundred times better than my chili recipe from 2016.
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