Ingredients Are Everything!

In the realm of my immediate friends, I don’t know anyone who gets excited to go grocery shopping like I do. When I spend all day every day in the kitchen, I find joy in little things like my ingredients and tools. For both cooking and baking, the quality of your ingredients will determine how good the dish comes out.

If I decide to spend the extra money and go to a farmer’s market, it’s almost always overwhelming because I want everything. All the gorgeous organic produce, fresh meats, cheeses, honey, jams, butters, you name it. It didn’t take me long to appreciate good quality produce in my adventures with cooking and baking.

Like most of America, I tend to go to my usual grocery store since I can try to get more for a little less money, but that doesn’t always mean I have to skimp on quality. When I’m planning recipes to write and film for the week, I like to go to the store and simply see what looks good. A couple weeks ago, I noticed there were tons of gorgeous strawberries, and even better, they were on sale! I got lots of them and made about 4 different strawberry recipes that week including pavlova, tart, sauce, and then enjoyed some just tossed with sugar and fresh orange juice with breakfast. I am all about versatility. I love getting one ingredient and being able to use it in a number of ways. That’s why I try to find the best quality I can afford. I like fresh ingredients to be the star of dishes, and when I put together a recipe and decorate it, I try to make sure you really know what the star of the dish is. I want some part of that ingredient to be in every part of the dish. The pavlova for example had a strawberry flavored meringue, strawberry cream, and fresh berries on top.

A lot of people struggle with getting creative in the kitchen. That’s sometimes caused by overcomplicating things and thinking you need to put together this intricate dish with all these components to it to try and be fancy. Something I’ve learned over the years of writing recipes and going to a variety of restaurants from cheap to super expensive is that simplicity is one of the most elegant traits of a dish. If you have a beautiful ingredient, doing too much to it is almost insulting it. A good quality ingredient has enough flavor to stand out on its own, so all you have to do is find a few other small things to emphasize everything that makes that ingredient special. Yesterday I saw heirloom tomatoes at the store, and I found this one that was particularly beautiful. I sliced it, drizzled some good olive oil over it, sprinkled some sea salt and fresh cracked pepper, and that was it. It needed nothing more. Obviously not all ingredients are like that, but the general idea of keeping it simple is always good to keep in mind when it comes to creating a good dish.

So next time you go to the store, and you aren’t quite sure what you want to make that week, or if you’re going and need a little inspiration for your next special meal, let your senses speak. What looks great? What smells good? Because if you don’t like it at the store, odds are you won’t like it on your plate.

Trying to Work for Myself - The Struggle is Real

I figured blogging would be a good way for me to come across to my audience in a more personal way. Ever since I started writing recipes on my website, I knew that I would be posting what I personally liked seeing on other recipe sites. A lot of people have grown to dislike scrolling through several pages to just get to a recipe, myself included. Granted, blogs that include so much text before an actual recipe are only aiming to teach their audience the recipe so that there is a full understanding behind the recipe and why it calls for what it does. My goal all this time was to try and incorporate most of that into the recipe itself to try and make it a bit more to the point with less to scroll through, because let’s face it, we are impatient.

I think a common factor behind this is that a lot of people have grown accustomed to what I call “quick content”; videos that are a minute or less, or recipes that are contained in one or two pages because we have grown a little lazy (for lack of better term). Life’s pace has grown quicker and quicker, and it shows in what we look at online in our free time. This doesn’t only go for food related pages, it goes for basically anything now. We become impatient so much easier and quicker, we are harsher with our judgement after having even less of an impression of someone, and we are bored after only 10 seconds of a video if it doesn’t catch our interest by then. The world of content creators, business owners, and anything online based is becoming difficult and rather brutal not only for those reasons, but also because there are increasingly more of us every day.

People’s ideas of work has evolved from the classic 9-5 office job to basically anything you could imagine. There are too many reasons to mention why people no longer want typical jobs, and I can’t say that I’m not included in that. We all have our reasons behind what we decide to pursue, and mine has changed over the years while still keeping the same end goal. When I was applying for colleges, I was heavily considering culinary school. I went through a lot of personal darkness in my teenage years, and food was one of my biggest distractions. Food ended up pulling me out of my darkness in ways I didn’t even know it could. It made me feel like I was good at something. It made me feel like I wasn’t alone because I saw that there was a community of foodies. It made me feel like I had something to show others. In a couple ways, food saved my life.

After going to school for mechanical engineering instead of culinary, largely due to the fact that most of my family didn’t support the idea, telling me I wouldn’t make enough money in that industry, I still knew that it was what I was passionate about. After 5 and a half years of getting one of the toughest degrees out there and trying to give it a chance, I never got a job in the field. There was such a lack of interest and passion that made it truly difficult to even keep applying for jobs after repetitive denials for lack of experience even though the jobs were entry level and I was fresh out of school with a decent GPA. When there’s no passion or interest fueling the fight for a job, do you keep fighting? Well, for a little while I felt that I had to because I needed income, and I didn’t quite know how to start working in food because I had no professional history with it. That’s when I decided to start a YouTube channel on the side while I looked for part time jobs in anything else I could find.

Out of college, I was working two part time jobs and doing my YouTube on the side, because I knew that I had a passion for food, and I wanted to share it. After years and years of watching shows on TV, I had the dream of having my own someday, but felt it was a pretty unrealistic goal to have, so I gave myself a show instead. Since my head was always in the kitchen, I got part time jobs that at least related to what I enjoyed. I worked retail for Williams Sonoma, and managed to get a kitchen position for Sprinkles Cupcakes. I would work at Sprinkles from 4am-noon, then go to Williams Sonoma from 5-10. The days were long, and the pay was minimal, but I was doing what I liked doing. Management at both jobs noticed that I had a passion for food, and recognized the confidence it took to put myself out there in my YouTube channel. Soon enough, they were giving me a little more responsibility and creative freedom, which meant the world to me.

After a couple years, I was completely burnt out. While I got enjoyment out of what I was doing, the exhaustion started to outweigh everything else because I was barely sleeping and still could barely afford my bills. At the age of 24, I was already going through mental breakdowns about what I was doing with my life, because I always held myself to super high standards and had these huge dreams and goals that I would have done anything to achieve. It was that period of time when I became a flight attendant. My YouTube channel had been barely getting any attention, which is very discouraging when you put so much time, effort and money into it over the course of a few years. My schedule as a newsier flight attendant was rather atrocious. I was barely ever home and didn’t have any sort of work life balance, so my YouTube channel had to take a backseat, and eventually, a halt altogether.

Once 2020 rolled around and the COVID-19 pandemic took its toll, I decided to take a year leave from my job, during which I poured my heart, soul, and hard earned money back into my channel to give it another shot. I had posted a video shortly after lockdowns took place and it randomly took off. I’m not talking about a million views, I’m talking 10,000, but for my channel, that was a ton compared to every other video I had ever posted. I started focusing my Instagram page towards food, doing more posts and videos on that platform to bring together a whole social media presence of one consistent image. Within a year, I had gained a study following and decided to test out some business ideas, since I was still barely making any money with social media.

After testing some holiday dessert mixes in 2020, I decided to register my LLC in January of 2021 and launch some mixes on my website. That alone is a serious job, trying to advertise enough to keep sales up, and maintain stock so that I could keep up with orders, not to mention shipping as well since I have always done all of this on my own. Social media alone is a full time job, because nowadays, you basically need to post daily to stay relevant, and creating content, especially when it’s recipe writing and baking, takes a lot of time. I started spending 10 hours a day in the kitchen just to film enough content for a few days, and that barely included any time for editing. When it comes to starting a new business that is purely online with a client base that is completely from social media, you have to dedicate all day every day to it to have any shot at making it work. When you keep that in mind, how would you have any time for another job, like being a flight attendant? Throughout 2021, my time became more and more limited, and I ran into the problem of not having enough time for my airline job, but my business still wasn’t making enough money to live off of.

By the end of 2021, I managed to get a publishing offer for a cookbook. It was a smaller publication that printed per order, so my books wouldn’t be available in stores or on amazon, which made it a little harder to push, but a cookbook was one of my biggest dreams, and this was an offer for one, so why would I say no to that? Throughout the first half of 2022, I’ve continued pouring more and more time into all of the pieces of this giant puzzle: pushing book sales, my own merchandise, social media content, and now paid content for other brands on social media. When you read all of that, you’d think “oh, he must be making bank now”, but honestly no, I’m not. I still to this day have a struggle of wondering if I’m doing something wrong, but like I said in the very beginning of this post, there are more and more of us online creators every day. Some of them get lucky and blow up overnight, and it makes certain days very difficult for us small business owners who have endured years of fighting to get to where we are today. I will say that now, I am at least making better money than I was before, but it’s still a struggle to try and work for myself. I know at the end of the day, I have more than enough under my belt to keep going and growing, and those out of reach dreams I once had seem a little more within reach now. I’m actually proud to say that a couple have already come true, and you’ll just have to wait and see what those dreams were.

In conclusion to all of this, you can look at one little video someone posts and be quick to judge their entire existence, but you have no idea that in my 30 second video where I’m trying to show you a fun recipe that I wrote myself, there are years of hard work, struggling, crying, hoping, and dreaming that lead to those 30 seconds. So while we’re too impatient to scroll through pages of something to get to the main point, it’s important to take a second to realize and appreciate just how much time and work went into that. There is so much work that goes into what we see online, and the hours, days, or even weeks of work that go into one single little post we take 30 seconds to see online are often overlooked or not even realized. Next time you see one of those videos or pages, just take a minute, see what they said, think about what they did to make that happen. I’m very lucky to finally see my hard work starting to pay off, and while I still have far to go, I know that now that I’ve overcome my fears, doubts, and insecurities, the sky is the limit. I hope that with this blogging, you not only get a better idea of who I am and where I’ve come from, but also join me on this adventure of trying to create something for myself, and above all, create things for others.