10 Years of Food Blogging

Today, I am celebrating 10 years of my blogging journey!  It’s Eat More Art’s 10th happy birthday day!! 🙂 On this milestone blog birthday, I am grateful for how far we have come.

Being a food blogger has taught me a lot of things: accepting failures, multi-tasking, learning skills that are way out of my league, being vulnerable, accepting criticism without getting disheartened, learning from it and trying to do better, etc.

Recipe development to putting it out there in the world is a multi-stage process.  Right from the conceptualization, to recipe development, to cooking, styling, and photographing it, writing the recipe for the blog, building and maintaining an infrastructure to share it, post it, putting it out on social media – the work and skillsets needed seem endless – but the reward of self-satisfaction and sharing my craft with the world is priceless.

For many of my recipes, this cycle is over 2-3 years. Many of the recipes that I am putting out now are made and clicked say 2-3 years ago, and many such in the pipeline.    And there are so many times that the recipe fails or I personally don’t like it.  There are probably more failures than successes.  

Learning basic techie stuff to build, host, and maintain a blog, learning marketing skills, SEO, photography, a bit of cooking (haha), research, conceptualizing ideas.  It is a whole different world.  I have probably learned 5-10% of it, I have the remaining 90% plus to go and hence, I enjoy it for the challenge of it all, and the potential of learning so much more, for the creativity, and of course for the food – as I am a picky eater myself 🙂

Sometimes it’s hard to stay motivated.  The grit, the patience, the confidence gets tested. Though I do appreciate the failures as it helps keep me grounded.   The pretty pictures, don’t tell the real story, the failed recipes do. 

During this Thanksgiving week, I want to express my gratitude for the fun, family, friends, food, and all the opportunities to learn that this blogging journey has given me.  I am grateful to all the strangers who turned into blog fans, and who kept me motivated by their cheers and healthy criticism, to do better. Together, we have come far, and we have much farther more to go.

This blogging journey started on November 25th, 2009. You can see the post here. And our very first recipe post was Soft Pretzels with Jalapeno & Garlic, which my niece Nikki, nephew Hersh, and I made together. The recipe still remains one of our all-time favorites.