Oh hey, hi there. It’s been a while, huh? I was just noticing that my last post was on my 42nd birthday, August 17, 2020. More than four years ago. I swear I didn’t mean to ghost you guys! Let me explain.
Chattavore was born in 2011 out of my desire to write. That was all I wanted to do…write about food. Writing was something I had always been pretty good at but I don’t have the mind for writing fiction and didn’t have a great outlet for non-fiction writing. As I read my favorite blogs (back then it was Pioneer Woman, Bakerella, and A Year of Slow Cooking), I realized that I could combine my love of food and cooking with my need for a creative outlet in written form and start a food blog. So here we are.
Writing a food blog has changed a lot in the last 15 years, and one of the changes is that people just don’t. want. to read. food writing. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a meme posted on Facebook where someone was complaining about how food blogs make your scroll through a bunch of writing (GROAN) to get to the recipe, I could retire now.
I really, really wanted to be a full-time food writer. So I spent a lot of time researching, learning about SEO, trying to follow all the directions for how to make sure that my blog was something that people actually wanted to read and that Google actually wanted to show them, buying dishes that were exclusively for photography because my beloved Fiesta dishes “don’t photograph well”, and trying to turn myself into a food photographer.
I spent an unbelievable amount of time doing all of this, to the detriment of my “real life”. I was on my computer until 9:00 every night (after coming home from my full-time job as a behavior analyst for a relatively large school system). I was tired, I was neglecting myself and my husband, and I was not getting what I wanted out of my blog. Apparently, no one wanted to read food writing, which is why I started blogging in the first place. I was making a little money, but it certainly wasn’t paying the bills, and also, writing a food blog doesn’t come with those sweet, sweet school system benefits (not sarcasm, the benefits are great).
So, I just left it. Just stopped writing.
My life looks different now. My now 23-year marriage imploded (not due to the blog, but that definitely contributed to the implosion) and we have spent three years putting it back together (we’re great now, but we have learned a lot of what to do and what not to do). I left my job, left the school system altogether to do clinical behavior work, then realized that public education was for me so I went back to my first love. I am teaching PreK special education in the school I attended as a child, and I have never been happier professionally. I no longer feel the need to escape my job. I can be a hobby blogger and be happy with that.
I’ve been thinking about my blog again for a while now, trying to think about how to start it up again, in a way that doesn’t end up hurting this time. Writing for me and hoping maybe someone else will want to read. While I still own (and love) my fancy camera, I probably won’t be pulling it out anytime soon. Y’all will just have to settle for my iPhone 12 Pro Max camera (old iPhones for the win!).
We’re going to live real life here, nothing aspirational. The “blog dishes” have been given away and we eat dinner on our colorful Fiesta dishes using Target flatware we were gifted at our 2001 wedding. We don’t go out to eat much these days, certainly not often to newer downtown restaurants. If I don’t feel like cooking, I pull something out of the freezer (I’ll tell you guys about my freezer cache one of these days) or we go to (gasp!) Taco Bell.
My small split-level house was built in 1977. My tiny, closed concept kitchen was too. It’s small, and it needs to be remodeled, but remodels aren’t cheap. We’ll get there someday, but today is not the day. Tomorrow isn’t looking good either. We are normal people who live in a normal house, and I am hoping that if I focus on normalizing normal, then maybe people can relate to what real life looks like, not always the perfect open-plan kitchen with dinner served on pristine matte white dishes with spotless linen napkins. No offense to those people! I read those blogs and follow those social media accounts. But I am not them.
I paid for subscriptions to NYT Cooking (I did this last year, and I have made so many great recipes and consult this app frequently) and America’s Test Kitchen (just bought this subscription and still making up my mind about it) and I am going to try (TRY, people, the key word is TRY) not to buy any new cookbooks in 2025. We’ll see how it goes. If Ina Garten or Deb Perelman release a new book in 2025, all bets are off. There won’t be a lot of recipes. Probably even less about restaurants. I can’t promise frequency. There are a lot of errors on my website that need to be fixed, so I need to work on that too. I can’t promise anything.
But I’m back. Maybe. We’ll see.
