Not the usual title you see (or want to see) on a food blog. However, it is exactly what I am doing.
I was recently engaged by a good friend to max my motivation all the time. In the list of 20 things he presented, #16 was...
"Be accountable: Announce your goal in public. Send emails to everyone about it. Post it on Facebook. Write a blog post about it. Let people know about the project that you’re planning to achieve"
After reading that, I was thinking to myself, hmmm....remember that blog I started awhile back, that is the (main) reason I started it; it was to challenge myself to get through all those recipes that I had been saving. If I announced it publically, then it would hold my feet to the fire.
I was doing very well with it. Things were getting done, even with a 3 hour a day commute, a almost one year old, etc. The blog started to grow with having a guess photographer and everything! I was pretty proud. Then something happen. I am not quite sure. My husband and I were growing deeply unhappy with our lives. We were feeling stuck with no way out. The commute, our jobs, the rut; it was all taking its tolls on us. Even it was showing through our little one.
We decided that if we wanted to be happy, we *had* to make some changes and not just talk about it. And not just little changes. They were going to need to be changes that made us step outside our comfort zone like we never have before. If not for ourselves, we needed to do this for our little girl.
So our focus changed and we worked on making our dreams a reality. Half of 2011, most of 2012, and some of 2013 was just that. We did achieve it. It was not without some heartaches and hard times (can you say Hurricane Sandy, cancer scares, and living half a country away from my family?) but we can say it was worth it. We walked away from the craziness of the East Coast, walked away from our well paying and well respected jobs, and moved to a place in the Midwest we never been before. We fell in love and haven't looked back since.
So back to the blog and my "engagement". Now that things have settled down a bit, perhaps I should get back and finished what I started. When I looked back to see just how long it has been since I last blogged, I couldn't believe the last entry was September 2011? Seriously!?!? It didn't seem that long ago.
So much has changed since this last entry. Because of my health and now living in a more rural area, I do more cooking now but it has to be healthier cooking (many of the recipes I have to go through aren't the healthiest). Since 2011, Pinterest has been born, there seems to be a ton of food blogs that have flooded the Internet like mine. Heck, there is even some drunk lady cooking show on YouTube!
So the question lies in do continue the blog? While I love the fact that people have chosen to follow my blog, my original purpose was to complete a challenge I set out for myself. However, I could do that without a blog. Another reason I had started the blog was for people to see that the world is not perfect and that it is ok to make mistakes. That is how we learn in this world. Go forth and be not afraid. That I think I would need some type of blog for.
As my ADHD mind wanders, I started thinking my new friends, community, about the 20 feet of snow outside and wishes of summer so I can go tubing down the river, I came up with perhaps another idea: involve my new friends in the blog! At least three of them are awesome cooks. I know. They just pulled together a surprise birthday party for my husband on the fly. My new house has an awesome kitchen; big enough to host my own cooking show (got to love the low cost of Midwest living!). So in "recipe roulette" fashion, I was thinking of taking the remaining recipes I have to go through, shuffling them up, putting the friends in rotation, and have them pull a recipe blindly, cook it, and blog about it!
It sounds like a good idea to me. However, I want to know what you, my loyal followers think about it. Is this something you would be interested in? If not, I am open for suggestions. Please feel free to comment to let me know your thoughts. I want to hear from you!
