There are two different kinds of writing about food on this blog, and they live in different places.
Recipes live in Recipes. Those are the posts with ingredient lists and step-by-step instructions; the things you can pull up on your phone, scale the servings, and actually make. If you came looking for dinner, that’s the door.
This section is the other thing. This is where the cooking essays live: the posts about how I cook, and why I cook the way I cook, and what I’ve learned from doing it for a long time. Not a recipe. The thinking behind the doing.
What goes here
The honest list:
- Equipment posts. Why I have a Kamado Joe (and why I’ll never go back). Cast iron care and the history of soap-on-cast-iron mythology. The sous vide I bought in 2015 and what it changed about how I cook. The tools earn their place because they actually shape how I work.
- Technique posts. Two days of roasting Hatch chiles on the Kamado in August. Eight pies for Thanksgiving (and the timing strategy that makes that not insane). Why I sous vide my Thanksgiving turkey. The deep work of doing one thing well.
- Process essays. How I think about cooking for two people with different nutritional needs. How I plan a holiday meal. How I shop, how I batch, how I freeze, how I waste less. The behind-the-scenes engineering that makes the rest of it possible.
- Cooking-as-craft pieces. The annual rituals (Hatch season, pie season, eight-pies Thanksgiving). The traditions that took years to develop and would take a paragraph to explain. The posts where the cooking IS the story.
That’s roughly it. If a post is mostly about the cooking — the process, the technique, the equipment, the act — it lives here.
What does NOT go here
This is the more important list, honestly.
Recipes don’t go here. Even if the recipe is technique-heavy. Even if it has a lot of process notes. If a stranger could follow it to make a specific dish, it’s a recipe and it lives in Recipes. Some posts get assigned to both, but only when the technique-essay component is genuinely doing its own work alongside the recipe.
Personal food stories don’t go here. Even when they’re about cooking. A post about my mom teaching me to cook is a Personal post; the cooking is the medium, not the subject. A post about why eight pies for Thanksgiving means what it means goes here, because the engineering of eight pies IS the subject.
Food history doesn’t go here. That’s What Got Lost.
Restaurant meals don’t go here. That’s Restaurant Reviews.
Anything about food justice, sourcing ethics, or the politics of who gets credit for what doesn’t go here. That’s Food & Politics.
The discipline is the point. The reason this category exists, and the reason it didn’t exist before, is that I needed a clean place for genuinely-about-the-cooking essays to live without absorbing every food post that touches a kitchen.
Why this section exists at all
Most food blogs use “cooking” as a junk drawer category. I did too, for years. Every post about food was technically “cooking” because I had to cook to write it, so everything got that label, and the category meant nothing.
When I rebuilt karacooks in 2026, I almost deleted Cooking entirely. Recipes go to Recipes; personal stories go to Personal; everything else has a real home. What was Cooking actually for?
Then I made a list of the posts I wanted to write that didn’t fit anywhere else, and the list was real. Why my Kamado matters. The Hatch chile ritual. The eight pies. The cooking-for-two-bodies problem. These weren’t recipes. They weren’t personal stories about other people. They were essays about the cooking itself — the craft, the equipment, the process, the way of doing.
So Cooking stayed, with a much tighter definition.
What you can expect
The posts in this section will land less often than the recipe posts, because the thinking-it-through takes longer than the cooking-it-down. A Hatch chile essay only happens once a year; the cooking-for-two-bodies post is years of working out an actual answer. Equipment posts come when something I’ve been using long enough to have a real opinion about earns the write-up.
If you cook the way I cook — patiently, repeatedly, in the same kitchen with the same tools, getting a little better at it each time — this is the section for you. Pull up a chair.
P.S. If you read a post in this category and you’re not sure why it’s here instead of in Recipes or Personal, ask. Sometimes the call is genuinely close. Sometimes I’ve made the wrong call and you’re right to flag it.
P.P.S. The Kamado posts are the ones most likely to multiply over time. I’ve had this grill since 2014; I have a lot to say about it.
P.P.P.S. If you’re brand new to cooking and you stumbled into this section looking for instructions: head to Recipes instead. This section is more “here’s how I think about it” than “here’s how to do it.”