Welcome to the first day of a brand new year. I like this year because I like repeating numbers and there’s something about 2020 that just seems really exciting. I can’t explain it, I’m not sure what I’m anticipating to happen, but that’s just the feeling I have.

I want to thank you for visiting my website – even when I don’t update with a new recipe or a new post for extended periods of time. Every now and again, I’ll check my stats and see people finding my recipes or revisiting several of them time and time again. I’m so so so appreciative of that, more so than I could ever express.

2019 was a year where I had a bunch of plans, I did a lot of work in regards to my cooking endeavors with not much to publicly show for it and grappled with the guilt of that. Halfway through the year, I had to get real with myself and confront some difficult things – mainly the big issue of listening to my body and resting as well as tackling the big monster called self-doubt.

I work a job that’s my means of income and everything that I do cooking related is in my spare time between that job. I’m just one person, I don’t have anyone else to fall back on, I’m my sole breadwinner. I’m also a workaholic, so I can easily fall into a pattern where I’m working every single day of the week and not taking time to relax because there’s this voice in my head that says taking time off is bad and I need to be working on something. Not only do I need to be working on something, that something has to have a byproduct for me to see that I’ve been doing something. It’s so easy to get caught up in this vicious cycle and let me tell you, if you don’t rest your mind and body, they will force you to do it.

My form of rest came as a huuuuge serving of near-crippling self-doubt, where I would make something and take a picture of it, then I’d ask myself a thousand questions on why I made that, why would I share a recipe like that, who would want a recipe for something like that, on and on and on. It was maddening and easier to just not even think about writing down a recipe to share for whatever I was making.

The thing is, I don’t want to give up my dreams of continuing down culinary endeavors. Whenever I sat myself down and thought about the choices I could make, I refused to give this up. So instead of agonizing over pictures and recipes or trying to fight my mind to accept my face on video for more YouTube videos, I auditioned for TV competitions because they’re so much fun! And I made plans and maps on how to get to where I want to go with this. I also finally decided to go for it on a big project (which I’m not ready to share yet) and have been working on plans and actually started doing work on things for that.

I usually try to keep things optimistic and positive and upbeat, but life is all about balance. Above all that, there’s reality and the truth. When I get to where I want to be in the future, I want to look back and be proud of myself for overcoming some tough things that came up along the way, I want to be thrilled to say I could’ve given up and I nearly did at certain points but I pressed on. So this is written mainly for me to keep track of where I am in this journey. And I want to thank you for coming along with me as a traveling companion.

I ended the year with an extended vacation in Hawaii to visit family and friends…where I ate a lot of delicious things, made some delicious food, and for the first time ever literally baked only one Christmas cookie instead of a mountain of them….

We’ll see what happens this year! I know that despite the work that I’ll be putting into everything, I will also ensure that I take time to rest.

Cheers to a wonderful 2020 for everyone! May there be a million reasons to laugh and smile. Here’s to another year of delicious dishes enjoyed by all. Sending my love and gratitude to you all.