So I’ve been redesigning the blog.
I’ll spare y’all the full backstage tour, but if you’ve been around here for any length of time, you’ve watched me cycle through enough visual identities to fill a small museum. Or possibly a cautionary tale. There was the cursive script phase, when the header looked like a wedding invitation and I’d somehow convinced myself that was the move. There was the minimalist phase, where I stripped everything down to a single thin sans-serif and called it sophisticated for about six weeks. There was the phase where I just used whatever WordPress theme I’d downloaded that week. There was, briefly, a phase involving attempting to scan my own handwriting into a font and a logo. I refuse to discuss that project any further.
None of it was me.
None of it was wrong, exactly. It was all things I’d seen working for other people, things that looked like what a food blog was supposed to look like. Soft pastels because food blogs use soft pastels. Script fonts because script fonts feel warm. Lots of beige because beige is calming. And then I’d sit down to write a post about why we owe Black cooks credit for Southern cuisine, or about Meemaw’s cornbread being carved in stone, and the cute little script font would just sit there at the top of the page looking like it was hosting a different blog entirely.
My word for 2026 is Authentic. And one of the things I have come to accept is that you cannot write authentically under a logo that doesn’t know who you are.
So I sat down and actually thought about it. What does this blog actually do? It cooks. It tells the truth about where the recipes came from. It’s garden-to-table. It gets political when it needs to. It talks about Texas and Georgia and grandmothers and grief and the time the oil overflowed and set a kitchen towel on fire. It is not soft pastels. It is not script fonts. It is forest green and burgundy and gold; it is Cinzel for the headers because the words on this blog should look like they mean something; it is Jost for the body because Jost is clean and modern and gets out of the way.
And then there’s the mark.
The new logo is a cross-section of a pepper. Specifically, a serrano-or-jalapeño-style green chile, sliced open so you can see the seeds and the membrane and the structure of the thing.
I want to tell you it was some long deliberative process, but really, it started with me sitting down with a sketch pad and a bunch of colored pencils and just doodling. It was the first thing I drew that felt right. And then it took me down a whole rabbit hole of cutting up a jalapeño and a serrano and a habanero and trying to draw them. (Reader: I’m an excellent photographer but I’m not an artist.) But I got there finally; and the more I sat with it the more I realized why.
A pepper cross-section is not the outside of a pepper. It is what’s inside a pepper. It is what you see when you cut the thing open and look at how it works. That is, more or less, the entire editorial premise of this blog. Cut things open. Show the seeds. Show the membrane. Show how the dish got here, who made it first, what got lost in the transmission, what we owe the people who aren’t credited on the recipe card.
It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, a chile. I am from the South and the West. I’m a Texan by birth. I spent a lot of my high school and college years in New Mexico. I married into a family of Coloradans and Arizonians. I roast Hatch chiles every September like it’s a religious observance. The pepper I drew is green and it is hot and it is unapologetic about both of those things. That’s who I am.
Once I had the shape figured out, the actual rendering took a while. The first clean digital version came out looking like it had been generated by an engineering CAD program — perfectly geometric, three seeds at exactly 120 degrees apart, lines crisp as a blueprint. Technically correct. Personally, nothing. I needed it to look like something a person drew, because a person did draw it. So we worked through iterations: hand-drawn line wobble that made the circles feel sketched rather than plotted; a pale green wash that brought the inside of the pepper to life; the cardinal points pulled fully inside the outer ring instead of riding on top of it; the stems extended all the way back to the center because that’s how peppers actually work. The version I landed on is mostly the original structure, just rendered the way I would have drawn it if I were better at drawing.
So: new logo, new colors, new fonts, new everything. I’m in the middle of rolling it out across the site, so things are going to look a little Frankenstein for a bit. Some posts will have the new look. Some will still have remnants of whatever I was doing in 2023. The header might change three times this month. Bear with me.
There’s more coming, too. I’ve been quietly developing a new series called What Got Lost — food history posts that pair a forgotten or distorted story with a related recipe. Some of them will be fun (the banana you’ve never tasted, the orange carrot that’s actually a political project). Some of them will have teeth (the racialization of MSG, the twelve-year-old enslaved boy who is the reason vanilla exists outside Mexico). The first one is in development. I’ll tell you more when it’s closer.
For now: new logo, same blog. Same recipes, same opinions, same Remy lying on the kitchen floor between me and the oven, same Zach asking me what’s for dinner thirty minutes after I’ve told him what’s for dinner.
Just, finally, looking like itself.
P.S. Yes, the logo is going on the watermarks now. If you see karacooks in the corner of a photo, that’s me, not someone stealing my pictures. Although if someone is stealing my pictures, I have questions about their judgment.
P.P.S. The cursive script header is in a drawer somewhere on a hard drive. I will not be sharing it. Some things should stay buried.
P.P.P.S. If you have strong opinions about the new colors or fonts, congratulations. I’m not taking notes.