Meal Planning and a Shift in Blog Focus

This blog is technically over 10 years old; if I flip back, my first posts are from 2015.

In 2015, cooking was largely a hobby. I worked in Big Tech and I could eat most of my meals at my employer’s cafeteria including breakfast, lunch and dinner (that’s 15 meals) although I remember setting a rule that I could only eat 2 meals at the office a day. For those remaining meals each week (somewhere between 6-11 meals), I could find amazing food in my Mission neighborhood, fully uncronstrained in my young, single, healthy-20s glory. Cooking was fully done for pleasure.

Let’s move to today. I’m married with 2 kids. That means 81 meals to cover each week although childcare covers 5 so we’re left with 76. My husband and I want to provide our children with healthy food and I’m enough of a food snob that I really can’t handle mediocre food more than a couple times a week. There is a lot of ways we simplify the math (repetition is a huge friend along with a lovely local chef who puts together a weekly meal service), but even so, we cook a lot more. And honestly, we’ve become more creative, intuitive, faster and successful at it.

Despite this, my growth as a cook isn’t necessarily the best at translating into developing recipes for a food blog. Much of what I cook are things I keep coming back to, mostly without recipes.

I personally draw so much energy from trying new things that I try to make time for it. Some dishes are failures or meh and we move on, continuing to trust in the spirit of experimentation. Other dishes are successes or almost successes. If our memories are generous, we find ways to integrate them into our rotations. More often than not though, things fall of our radar because our memories are fallible and I haven’t bothered to write anything done.

With that in mind, I want to experiment with treating this blog as less of a “recipe blog” and more of a food journal. I’ll document the recipes and dishes I tried to make along with how did they go and what I’d do differently. In some ways it feels positively retro (think LiveJournal-ification in an AI first world) but it’s also something that feels personal and tractable and I’m pretty excited about creating a record for myself and anyone who is interested in joining for the ride!