The Future of Baked In

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do with this blog. I love, love, love sharing recipes, but if I’m being totally honest, I get a little bored with it sometimes. I also sometimes lose motivation after a crazy workweek, especially during the winter when I know I have about two hours of Saturday with enough natural light in my apartment to get decent pictures of whatever I make. Unfortunately, those two hours always seem to fall at the exact time I’m fused to the couch catching up on my Real Housewives. Do you see my dilemma? I’m a decent multitasker, but it’s really hard to bake cookies AND be a rabid member of Team Brandi at the same time.

But back to the boredom thing – I always said that if anything about the blog ever started feeling like a chore, then I was done. But really, I think that’s a little extreme and that I just need to switch it up a little bit. Who likes monotony? Nobody. This will always be first and foremost a food blog, but I don’t necessarily want to restrict it to just recipes anymore – there is a lot more to all of our lives and I want to incorporate a slightly wider field of vision into this site. I’ve got a few ideas:

• Health and fitness – I lost twenty-five pounds last year and embraced exercise and health in an entirely new way. I would really like to share some of that here. Although I promise – no, scratch that, I SWEAR – that this will never, ever, ever become a place where you’ll click over and see forty thousand pictures of a bowl of oats slathered with nut butter or a detailed account of everything I’ve eaten in the last 24 hours. God.

• Reviews/recaps of food-related TV and movies – Upwards of ten years ago (ugh, old), I used to write for a now-defunct website doing (admittedly snark-filled) recaps of television shows like 24, Ally McBeal, and the like (ugh, old again). I LOVED doing this and had a ton of fun, mostly because it involved two of my favorite things – making fun of stuff and watching TV. These days I have the Food Network on a lot – mostly as background noise while I’m cooking, and no I cannot catch up on Real Housewives this way because it requires my full attention – anyway, I can’t tell you how often I end up being like, WTF WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH ALL THAT BUTTER STOP STOP STOP! You may start seeing some of that incredulity here.

• More life stuff – I waver on this one because honestly, my life isn’t that interesting. I don’t have kids, I have a more-than full-time day job which I wouldn’t write about here, and I’m not really a me me me type so can’t really see myself becoming the kind of blogger who shares every minute detail of a day. So maybe just when something really interesting happens (translation: probably pretty rarely). I also think because I, my boyfriend, and my friends are a little older and didn’t grow up with everything online, we’re just not as comfortable with everything being out there on the innerwebs, and I will always respect that line.

So to the point of this post  – I want your input on what you see here. Blogging is sort of weird in that it’s one of the only products where the consumer (the reader) doesn’t have much of a say. Sure, you’re reading it for free, but a lot of blogs are monetized and rely on clicks to make any revenue, so reader input should matter to some degree, I think. I don’t know if I’d really call this site monetized (definitely not to the degree of bigger more widely read blogs), but I do carry some advertising to offset server and other costs. My blog audience is pretty small and I don’t really know (or care) if it gets any bigger, but for those of you who do read, your opinion matters to me. If you want to share your opinion on the site, its content, and what we do here going forward, I’d love for you to complete the survey below so I can see what kind of feedback you have. Be honest, be brutal, say what’s on your mind – nothing is off limits. And thank you for being a part of my little corner of the web.