On the birth of my new cooking blog

I just counted the actual posts, and I've written on this blog a total of 12, TWELVE, times since moving to Portland six years ago. The death of blogging isn't a burden carried on my shoulders alone; in fact, there isn't a single blog I routinely follow anymore when for years there were dozens. We went short form with Twitter or visual with Instagram. We went the quicker, easier route.

Tonight we rewatched The Big Sick, which is 100% a movie you should watch. The lead character is semi-forced to give up his family to be with the woman he loves. During a pivotal scene in the movie, I told Paul I was glad neither of us had to give much up to love the other. This is the point in my writing where I blame Paul for my not blogging. Thanks for your love Paul, how could you let me not chronicle the last six pivotal years of my life? Geez, that guy.

Okay, jokes. I didn't blog the 18 months before I met him and I haven't blogged the last 4 years+ we've been married. That's on me. And I'm so sad about it, but only because I got sucked down a wormhole of reading old posts the other night and I realized I miss the effort of writing for non-professional reasons. Where I can throw out most grammar and punctuation rules and simply write as it makes sense to me. (True story: 10 years ago when asked why I should get hired I told the hiring manager "I write a really great email." 8 years into that job, said hiring manager told me that statement and the confidence behind it is what earned me a business card with their company name on it.) 

Last bizarro thought for the night. Neither Paul nor I are interested in full scale cooking. I like to tell people we're 'great assemblers,' which is short-hand for lazy with a side of 'we mostly like to eat out.' In the last year we've gotten much better about having food on hand at home to eat (because Remy goes to bed at 6:30 and we live next to nothing good to eat and we're too lazy to leave the house in search of food). There are a handful of frozen Costco products we keep on hand that we can quickly throw in the oven and pat ourselves on the back for having a home-cooked meal. (My primary favorite being chicken cordon bleu and a side of broccoli.) Someone recommend a blog for me that's THOSE kind of meals. Since a cursory search of the interweb crushed my dream of finding "easy" meals that require 5 ingredients or less, I shall be forced to start that blog on my own.

At least this will give me a purpose. Riiiiiiiight?

And like all cooking blogs, the wind-up to the actual recipe is four paragraphs too long when all you want is the photo and the ingredients and not some four-paragraph story about how this recipe came to be. Oye. I hate myself. 

Tonight's assembled dinner: TACOS

• Ground beef previously cooked (from frozen!) in an Instant Pot
• Cook yourself tortilla with melted cheese on it
• Pre-made pico de gallo
• Add some spinach
• Add some avacado

WAHLA. Pat for yourself on the back for making dinner. I know I do.

Also bucking the food blog trend by taking a single photo that doesn't oversell what it is you're going to make. Also: not building my own light box.