It doesn’t take a genius to see when stuff isn’t working. But then, no one ever accused me of being bright. With chezGeek moving to mirepoix.org, my readership took a predictable hit. Links, including the Wall Street Journal’s and the various cooking related sources, main suppliers of a steady stream of 2,000 or so daily visitors, still pointed at cG.
At about the same time, work heated up in the kitchen. A new sauté and daytime Sous created additional stress for a rather new team of cooks, learning the ropes of the establishment themselves. Add to this a daytime commitment to volunteer at various food and pantry related organizations in the Metroplex, and time for blogging became rare.
Less readers meant less compulsion to write much and well, badly written blog posts meant even less readers, a curious cycle which, to be frank, didn’t bother me one bit. I had things to do, places to be, and a chef breathing down my neck.
Lately, however, I have been missing the blog. The thrill in the morning to wake up to 40+ comments discussing my posts, the complete strangers I occasionally meet in person telling me they’d bought a sauté pan or knife based on something I wrote. Or, even more fun, finding people making my recipes. Or the gal who enrolled in culinary school and got herself a prep station job at a local fine dining restaurant emailing me and telling me how she wasn’t sure she’d fit in until she’d read my writing about kitchen life.
So, here we are. Mirepoix 2.0, the second incarnation. As I tell my cooks, if it doesn’t work trash it and start from scratch. In blogging, unlike a kitchen, it’s however not just about your last dish – a blogger’s social capital comes from a body of work. This one’s in defiance of that. We’ll see how it comes out. And if only five people read what I have to say, well, then so be it :).
It couldn’t have come at a better time, either. Between a trip to Europe, sure to include dining at L’auberge and cooking at La Maison in Paris, as well as a trip to Southern Germany for some sausage recipes, and a trip to Canada in August, complete with an expenses paid restaurant crawl, it’s the time to spring-clean the blog and get serious again.
Oh, and not to mention – this one has video. And I heartell someone wants a video of my mad Spaetzle scraping skills.
