Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

** THIS IS MEANT TO GO IN A SEPARATE SECTION OF ITSELF. IT STAYS HERE BECAUSE I NEED TO SHIFT THINGS QUICK! **

Ideas Journal (this) Fermentation Journal (the other one) Failure Journal (Failure blog becomes failure journal)

Walk Journal: I initially wanted a walking blog, but I never wrote it out because I created such a high expectation for myself on what it should be. Now, it’s just going to be very low-key, basically a review of my experience and various trails and so forth. “Oh, I walked. This is such a cool hike, or this is such a cool route. This is such a cool restaurant,” and so forth. My experience walking—I really like walking and hiking—and it will be a great place to document my experiences there.

Why Nepal Journal: This will be a new journal. I have, as I mentioned earlier, spent a couple of thousand words on it already. It’s going to be a place where I can share with the public my thoughts and views on what things should be going in Nepal, what we can do, what the opportunities are, and so forth. I have often not really given it a lot of thought, so it will be a great opportunity for me to formalize my thoughts about Nepal for the first time.

Menu Journal: I want to come up with different recipe ideas and different menu ideas that I want to share with my friends when I’m hosting, so it’s a very personal, high-class experience when I have people over. The other advantage is, I come up with all of these excellent recipes and ideas and explorations, but I keep forgetting them because I don’t document those. So once I start documenting them in that journal, it’ll be great to go back as a reference and use those in the future. Additionally, it will also get my friends excited to come to my place, make them feel like the experience is a lot more premium than I have otherwise offered, and they can see what I have been up to in the past. Additionally, it will also be an example of my commitment to cooking and the food industry that I can use to showcase my interests in other cases.

I will create a menu with the recipes of items I am making or have made before my friends come in. That way, they know exactly what they’re eating, but also why that food is important to me and why I decided to make that particular food item.

For example, I will be making an inauthentic tuo for my friends when they come here next. What about it? Why am I making it? I will talk about my experience in Ghana and how I ate the killer tuo every day and how I loved it so much, and why cooking with plantains is so fun, but also so hard. I will talk about the taste combination, how plantains are used in other contexts and why it’s so good in this context. The name will be something: “She’s Completely Inauthentic Ghana Tuo,” and so forth. The other thing I want to make is nettle soup and then fura, which is millet porridge.

These are exciting topics, and adding a menu that has personal connection to me and context to the menu helps people understand me, the food, better connect to it better, and inspires them to treat their own menus in a similar manner. It will also help me figure out how to create a premium experience and communicate the ingredients, process, and sourcing more transparently.

It will be a menu journal, but I also want it to be an experimental and recipe development journal. Snacks and other combos that I try that sometimes work and sometimes don’t. Because a lot of the items I cook can be very good, but the idea and the creation, the recipe, is unfortunately lost forever, which is a massive bummer for me because I can’t replicate that, but also because I don’t get to share the outcome of my experiments with other people.

I will probably, to start with, add a standard template because I don’t want to get carried away by formatting. Eventually, though, after I’ve gone towards at least 8 to 10 recipes or menus, I want to apply a custom template and custom formatting to the menu blog to make it really premium looking. I don’t want to do that right now because the point of this is not a technical exercise on how to create a menu online for my website. It is to write properly, present a menu, share a recipe, and entice my guests and inspire them. The presentation part comes later. The effort will be worth it only if the content that goes in is worth it. Therefore, I must create a decent amount of content before I design the templates properly.