- a band of loosely organized criminals who thrived on the Gulf Coast and throughout the Deep South during the latter part of the twentieth century. Locals will recognize the story and those behind it. Others will be intrigued by these never before told tales of this criminal enterprise and its most sinister characters. Gambling. Robbery. Extortion. Even murder.
from bestseller Janet Evanovich!
I love the new year. Despite the fact that many of us - yes, me included - make resolutions that we soon break, I still look at it as an opportunity to sort of brush away the year that has just past, and get a fresh start. A new perspective. That is exciting to me!
It has really only been about a year since I started seriously blogging and this past year has been a wonderful whirlwind. I discovered the world of blogging and decided to start, or really revive a blog I had started when I first turned 50. A lot of things had happened - that terrible hurricane called Katrina put an economic damper on things down here along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and as a result of that, I lost a very long held job I'd had with the same company for 12 years, and essentially what became the end of a long legal career.
After thousands of applications and only a handful of actual interviews since, I learned real quick that once you hit age 50, it's difficult to find work in my profession, or even in a related profession that could utilize my skills. Law firms don't pay that well down here to begin with, and its much easier for attorneys to hire fresh young new college graduates at a much lower salary, than it is to have to pay someone their worth for more than 20 years of legal experience. Such is life.
Then I discovered blogs. And I'll be honest with you. I have always wanted to write. I love the expression of experience and feelings that come through words and in fact, had initially wanted to go into journalism. There were several road blocks that got in my way throughout my lifetime - the first of which believe it or not, was desegregation of all things. Redistricting and shifting of students around from one school to the next, moved me to a new school my last year of junior high and consequently stripped me of the opportunity to take a journalism class and be part of the school paper, something that I had worked to get into all summer that year. My new school did not have a similar program.
Over the years I still tried to get into it though, working for a time at a very small community newspaper who insisted my focus be more on sales than writing. I also tried for years to get on at a local newspaper, but discovered many years later that my applications probably went into a trash can as soon as I left because the personnel manager was close friends with someone who I didn't know until years later worked there, and who I definitely know did not like me due to an ex-connection. I did manage to work in some minor writing in college for our school publication, but never really got to exercise my writing like I had dreamed of.
I ended up studying business and fashion merchandising in college and worked in retail for years, before my career took a different fork in the road when I moved to New Orleans for a time. It was there that I took a temp job working for a criminal attorney who also happened to be the president of the Indigent Defender Board for Jefferson Parish. I wasn't real crazy about the criminal aspects of law, but I soon learned that I loved the law itself and everything about it. Journalism and writing got put on the back burner and my legal career spun off for the next 20 years.
Fast forward to post-Katrina, the loss of my job, and then the tanking of our economy and companies of all kinds put the clamps down on hiring everywhere. We were already suffering a depression in our area thanks to the hurricane and now it was only worse. In these past few years I have often looked up to the heavens and said "Lord, what exactly is it you want me to do?" Blogging soon became an outlet for me to both occupy my mind and my time, while also having an opportunity to practice my love of writing and the blog 'My New 30' was born.
I have discovered that some people blog to practice writing. Some blog purely for fun. Some blog politics. Some religion. Some blog strictly for money. And some bloggers are just downright funny. I find myself somewhere in the middle, because while I love to write, I don't know if I am a writer. I think I have a little bit of a sense of humor and I have to say that I absolutely LOVE blogging for fun, because it really is fun. I enjoy it. And I do treat it as a part time job - something that since finding work in the corporate world has become near about impossible at my age, I hope that my little blogs will provide a little bit of retirement income thanks to folks who enjoy my writing and are kind enough to click on some of those links, buy products I recommend, and visit my advertisers.
And then soon after, in the midst of searching for a recipe for something... I discovered food blogs. Oh my.
I saw a lot of folks were using blogs as a way to sort of store their own recipes and I thought what a fantastic and clever idea! So I started adding the recipes I was making to my blog - mostly lower fat, everyday recipes that I was eating at the time trying to lose weight. But then I noticed that while there were already a lot of general recipe blogs like that out there, there were also blogs that specialized in certain areas, themes, or categories - one topic blogs that featured only cakes, or cupcakes, or cake balls, or breads, or low fat recipes, or Weight Watcher recipes, or some were specific to certain ethnic foods such as Mexican, Asian, German, Italian, and some even to certain areas of the country, like a ranch in Oklahoma, or a displaced Texan's most beloved and missed dishes, or a New York couple blogging about both dining and cooking. There was a food blogging niche for virtually everything, but I noticed that there were not really very many southern food blogs, and at the time, none that I found for my area of the coastal south. I decided to take that on and put my focus on southern coastal foods and my blog began to blossom, eventually moving to its own home at Deep South Dish.
I've also unfortunately seen what the pressures of blogging can result in. For me it meant throwing myself into it like I did with my legal career - full force and somewhat obsessively. I am a bit of a perfectionist after all. I was spending day and night on the blog! Unfortunately, while I do have a few affiliate links and advertising on my blogs, I'm not being paid a salary or by the hour! So I realize that while I only want to be authentic with my blogs, I must also seek balance.
To me, authentic food blogging means posting your own personal family favorites or recipes that you create yourself, together with photographs of what you have made. For food blogging, that is a lot of cooking that most people just do not do realistically these days. Even down south, between our favorite foods - many notorious for higher levels of cream, butter, bacon and all things full fat - we also eat lighter meals in between to balance our tummy's and diets out. That is hard to do when you want to have an authentic food blog, because people want to see new content! And unfortunately, I've seen what the pressure to post every day can do to food bloggers.
Pressured to post fresh content daily, some food bloggers who start off authentic in their intent, end up posting random recipes - often just pulled off the internet. I've seen this way too often here lately and y'all already know how I feel about Foodie Fakes! Then they snatch images off the net and put the two together to create a post, just so that they have a new post every day. Sorry. First of all, that's just downright theft. Period. But also, if you did not already have that recipe in your collection, or if you did not create that recipe, shopped for the ingredients, actually cooked it in your own kitchen, and then with minimal exceptions, took photos of it, that's not an authentic food blog to me. That is deceit and you are a fraud. Period.
And then there is the downside of fame. The same fame that you see take over the sensibilities of Hollywood, seems to also change some bloggers too. I have always had a very strong gift of discernment and I can see straight through a fraud. And ask The Cajun how I feel about lying or deception in any way shape or form, because it is really hard to lie to me. Now I realize that once you reach some level of fame in the blogging world, you begin to earn big advertising dollars from sponsors and that puts pressure on folks to buzz out content and keep the advertisers happy. Having a background in business, I certainly understand that.
Unfortunately, I have seen bloggers who, as they increase in popularity, become out and out braggarts, constantly touting self-promotion and blowing their own horn with "I did this, and I did that and aren't I just the greatest?" and I don't know about you, but that's a bit of a turnoff to me. And there are some that need to promote themselves but don't want to come across as braggarts so they feign humility, and that's almost as annoying. And then there have been a few I've seen who flat out mislead their readers by over-exaggerating certain accolades to artificially elevate their fame status. The "fake it till ya make it" theory in practice I suppose, but to me it's deception, and deception is dishonest.
Now, I'm not famous by any means, nor do I ever expect to be, but if I were and I started acting like this, I'd hope somebody would come knock me down a few notches and bring me back down to reality before I totally lost myself. I am what I am, and that is what y'all will always get. If I ever start getting big-headed, somebody better come and knock some sense into me quick!!
Deep South Dish will always be authentic. You will only see my own recipes - either those passed down or created by me - and it will always be food that is cooked in my own kitchen, from tried and true recipes, and, with very few exceptions, with my own photographs. Occasionally, especially during seasonal times of the year, if I cannot get to cooking a recipe that I wanted to feature, I might post the recipe anyway, but you can rest assured that it will always be a tried and true recipe of my own and never one that I have just snatched from the internet. Eventually I get around to making it, and I always go back and add in the photos when I do.
At first I did put a lot of pressure on myself when I decided to make my blog about southern cooking. People had expectations and I needed content! I certainly wanted it to be all my own content so I worked hard to put up genuine southern food content daily, and I did it for awhile in this first year, even sometimes posting multiple times in one day in an effort to build a legitimate southern food blog!
That has certainly absorbed an enormous amount of my time in the past year, and some of the rest of my life has suffered, like namely my house and my waistline! Now ya'll know why The Pioneer Woman, who has an amazingly successful blog business, has separate sections on her blog and not just cooking. And why she has added Tasty Kitchen, a community where other people post their recipes and she gets to host and feature them. Yep, I've put some extra unwanted pounds on my frame with a dedicated food blog, because well, for one, we actually do eat what I cook and post, but also because I have not taken the time for myself to exercise like I should. I need to walk. Every day. And I haven't been all this year because I spend all of my time working on the blog.
So as we move into the new year, I've decided that I am going to relax a bit. While I intend to be both an authentic and serious food blogger, I hope to maybe not take my blogging so seriously. I want to continue to have a little fun at it. And, now that my blog is off the ground and a bit established so to speak, I think I can begin to relax a bit.
Of the many things I will resolve myself to do as I always do when the old year rolls over to the new - lose weight, eat better, de-clutter my house and my life, catch up on postponed and delayed projects, and get organized - I also hope in the new year to schedule more time for myself.
Here on My New 30, you'll still see general banter and content, gardening stuff, money saving ideas, coupons and special offers, reviews and product giveaways, local interest articles and other such things. Over on Deep South Dish you'll still see recipes and photography on a regular basis, several times a week, but rarely every day or several times in one day. You may even see a recipe repost on occasion over there, that being one that I have featured early on but may have updated a bit. And, don't be surprised to see a guest post and other features on occasion. But don't worry. You'll still see good ole southern cooking, and it'll be mine, because one thing I never want to lose is authenticity.
Thanks for being a faithful reader of my banter - especially those occasional southern style hissy fits that find their way around occasionally! I hope you get a smile on occasion, or enjoy an indulgent fatty traditional southern meal on occasion, but most of all, I hope that you know that I love and appreciate you all.
And if you read all the way through to the end of this, I really, really love you! :)
I wish you health, happiness and a very Happy New Year - may God's grace and blessings shine down on you in this coming year.
