Hi Reader
Before I left for Boston last week, I spent all of Sunday cleaning my office.
I’d been putting it off for months. The large Monstera behind my chair finally got its leaves wiped down, stacks of notebooks were pushed into neat piles, camera cables went back into the old box they’ve lived in for years, and the exercise ball I temporarily moved into the house finally made its way back to the garage. I even unpacked my Jono Pandolfi teapot, which I picked up a few weeks ago at a sale, brewed a pot of tea, and let myself settle into the strange comfort of reorganizing small things.
This ritual matters more to me than it probably should.
I’ve learned that when my workspace falls apart, my brain usually follows soon after. The clutter slowly turns into noise. I get distracted more easily. Recipes stay unfinished. Emails sit unanswered. Little piles become large piles. Somewhere in the middle of it all, a quiet anxiety creeps in and starts asking if I’ve lost my ability to focus.
When I left research to work in food full-time, I imagined working from home would be liberating. From a creative standpoint it was, but often the days felt strangely quiet. I was in the kitchen with Snoopy, my beagle-boxer mix, tinkering with recipes while he watched me from the couch with what I’m now convinced was deep skepticism and bewilderment.
The blog forced me to teach myself food photography using a tiny Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot camera. Most of the photos were terrible. Truly terrible! I did not know how to style food, work with light, or make anything look remotely appetizing. Sometimes I’d balance bowls on trash cans near the window and wait for the sun to cooperate. Other times I’d try photographing myself sifting flour into cake batter with a timer and sprint back into frame before the shutter clicked. Many a cake and frosting were sacrificed in the pursuit of photography.
Almost none of it was good.
But I loved the process of figuring it out.
I loved the quiet rhythm of testing recipes, adjusting spices, moving plates around the kitchen table, learning how ingredients changed their behavior entirely dependent on how they were treated, or why onions tasted sweeter after browning slowly. There was joy in the process because it felt like enough.
Back then, the internet felt smaller. Food blogs were like tiny neighborhoods where people exchanged stories and wrote their recipes. We weren’t chasing virality. We cooked something because we were curious or because we wanted to feed someone. Or because we wanted to introduce people to something new.
Things are much faster now. Recipes are content. Photos became videos. Everything is louder now and demands our immediate attention. And somewhere along the way, I think many of us quietly started measuring the value of our work by how loudly the internet responded to it.
This week, Flavor Forward was nominated for a James Beard Award in the Instructional Video category. I’ve been nominated twice before, once for Season in the Photography category and then for The Flavor Equation in the Reference, History, and Scholarship category. But this nomination feels especially meaningful because the show itself felt like an experiment from the beginning.
I’d never hosted a cooking show before. I would be lying if I didn’t say there was a bit of fear with this new undertaking. But someone wise once told me fear of failing can be a good thing — it means you care. What made the experience special was working with an incredibly thoughtful team that believed food science and curiosity could still feel warm, personal, and joyful. Somewhere between all the diagrams, spice jars, camera setups, and long filming days, we made something we’re genuinely proud of.
And while I’m incredibly grateful and honestly still processing it all, I keep reminiscing about those early days in the kitchen, with Snoopy watching me burn through batches of cake and take badly lit photographs. Back then, success looked much smaller. It was figuring out how to brown onions properly or finally taking one photo that didn’t look terrible. The joy came from the process itself, from slowly learning how to make something better than the day before.
That’s the part of creative work I’m still trying to hold onto. The part that’s curious and quiet. The part that falls in love with the process before worrying about the outcome.
This nomination means more to me than I can properly put into words. Mostly because it reminds me that all those quiet years of learning, experimenting, failing, and trying again mattered. And that somehow, through all the noise, the work still found its way to people.
