I made a new blog today. I am assuming that some of you - my guess would be most of you - resonate with the word "new." As in, you know about the old one. Maybe you are happy to hear this news, maybe you resonated with some of the words I used to write for many years on a different platform. Maybe not. Maybe many of you don't know what I'm talking about and maybe you're wondering why anyone would start a blog in 2018 (frankly, I'm not sure, and I'm trying to figure that out). Alternatively, maybe I am making a huge leap by assuming that anybody is reading this at all. But I hope so - a little bit. To tie loose strings together swiftly, I had a blog for almost ten years and it was a place that housed my words, photos, reflections. I don't use that blog much anymore, and I think I am okay with that. I grew up and away from it, for the most part. But something has driven me to create a new one, and I want to pick that apart a little bit.
(Disclaimer: I am going to try to keep this from being too cliche but I also had a few glasses of wine tonight and it is late on a Friday and well, these circumstances make sentimentality an attractive option. I hope you understand.)
As I have grown, different creative practices have served me in different ways. For as long as I can remember, reading and writing were that practice - and they still are. In high school, photography became this practice. It became my entire life - it still is, in a smaller way. In college, I started cooking. The backstory of how I started cooking is for another day (/post), but I will abbreviate it for the intents and purposes of this introduction: when I populated darkest point of my life, learning how to cook and appreciate food taught me valuable lessons about how to care for my mind and body, in ways that continue to serve me to this day, and every day. As I learned how to cook, and as my appreciation for food grew, I began to share photos of my experiments on Instagram. I am not sure if many people knew how important the practice of documenting this journey was for me, but it continued, and it still exists. In other words, one thing that is obvious to anyone is that I am one of those people who posts too many pictures of food on social media. One of those people who stands up at restaurants to capture "the shot" of a dish, as my dining companions gaze over their shoulder in another direction as if to signal to nearby diners, "I'm embarrassed to be associated with her!"
I am happy to play along with these jokes, because I understand them. Taking pictures of your food and sharing them to Instagram looks vapid, and maybe it is to some degree. But I need to explain that my relationship to food and cooking is also a very deep, and very meaningful, part of my creative practice. To take a step back: I spent a long time wondering why I stopped writing as often, why I stopped taking pictures as often, and even why I stopped blogging (the old one) as often. These were my creative practices and they were a very necessary, engrained part of my life. They were so necessary that they were mindless, mechanical. I did them without thinking and they helped me survive a lot of my life, in the form of documenting, recording, sharing - usually with strangers (more on my feelings related to publishing this more overtly under my own name/identity later). When I did them less, I really did feel a sense of failure with respect to my creativity. It took me years to realize that cooking had evolved into a creative practice for me, and it was fulfilling me in the same ways that writing and photography had. I was learning very simple, concrete skills (how to sauté; how to braise; how to roast which vegetables at which temperature and for how long; how to mince, chop, chiffonade), but I was mostly learning the very complex, endless lesson about how to care for myself. More on all of this later, too.
As I said, I posted pictures of my results to Instagram, and I thought mostly nothing of it (I actually thought that most of my friends were bothered by the pictures). One day, I decided to try the new (new to me) Instagram polling feature to test a hypothesis that a few friends have suggested to me over time: should I make a food blog? I was surprised, by happy, by the results. It turns out that the majority of my friends and connections are not bothered by the food pictures; in fact, many of them are interested in how I make my food, how I decide what to cook, and - perhaps most potently - how I came to develop this passion and creative practice. Through the people who have reached out to me to express these ideas (and I thank you, endlessly, if you have), I came to realize that I might have semi-interesting and semi-unique insights to offer. Might. But even in spite of that possibility, I have also been itching to reconnect with my oldest, dearest practice of writing for a very long time. Perhaps this blog will allow me to marry two practices that have served me in indescribable ways. I am eager to see how it turns out.
I put off making a food blog (let's call it that for now, but I really don't know how much of this will be strictly "food") for awhile because I could not reconcile my messy interests, tastes, and motivations with the branding aspect. I had no idea what my "thing" would be. I eat plant based food, but I don't want to be a plant based blogger. I discovered a passion for cooking after dealing with depression, but I don't want to just be a person who relates food to mental illness. I tend to eat healthy, but I definitely don't want to be a health blogger. I want this space to be as dynamic as possible, and I don't want to cater it to a particular lifestyle, habit, or diet (more on that later, too, I guess - as I come up with prospective ideas for long form posts...). I just want to write about food as it relates to my life, which is in myriad and endless ways.
If I am to give a ballpark estimate of what this might look like, I would say: it will have some recipes (but I cannot promise measurements); it will have some stories and reflections about the journey with food I cited above; it will connect the dots between depression and diet (in my personal experience); it will rave over-enthusiastically about certain pantry ingredients and vegetables; and it will try to explain my various philosophies about food, health, and diet. In short, I have a lot to say about food and I am looking forward to putting those thoughts into words, and putting those words onto a page.
For those of you who have made it to the end of my ramble, thank you, and I am incredibly happy if you're encouraged to follow along.
Thanks,
Jessie
PS: I made a minor jump when I started my post with "I made a new blog today," glossing over the fact that I also made a new website. Jessie-roth.com exists now, and I am pretty excited and proud of it. Feel very free, obviously, to browse my other work in the aforementioned areas of writing and photography, and just know that I intend this whole domain as a place to house my various pursuits. They are multiple and random and I am just trying to fit them together, for myself and for others.
PPS: Please, please feel free to share ideas of what you might be interested in hearing about with respect to food, cooking, recipes, what have you. I am in uncharted territory with this whole "dedicated food blog" thing and I would love to know what you'd like to know more about.