This website is live for the first time on December 8th, 2024!*
Welcome!

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Dear internet visitor across time and space,

I hope you enjoy this new little project of mine. If I have any goal for this website, it’s to keep this website going for as long as possible, for it to be enjoyable, fun, and easy to use, and ultimately for it to exist as a playful complement to my professional aspirations. I'm excited that this is one of the only personal pieces of work that I’ve shared publicly in the past few years – that’s to say, not in any way for anyone or anything else. Just for me, and for you, whoever you may be.

And, I’m especially excited that it’s about food.

The main inspiration for this site came from studying and practicing all sorts of cooking (techniques) for the past year+, but feeling like I wanted to keep a record of it, or a diary, in some way. I started to keep a written journal around but I wanted something that I could also share, and be just a bit more creative, too. When I eventually started to practice plating and presenting my food, even if only for myself at home, it occured to me that a website might just be the perfect medium: a place to write, a place to share pictures, and a place to share a bit of myself and my friends, too, when it comes to cooking at home. Suddenly, it seemed obvious. A cooking website that was the cooking website I always wanted to find online.

Et voila, here we are now!

While I can’t predict how the website will evolve, I’m excited to see what grows.

For now, you’ll find a couple nascent ideas, most of it coming from how I was approaching learning all things cooking, or cookery, if you will (hehe). I wanted to document simple fundamentals that, despite being simple, one might forget from time to time or simply not know. For recipes, I wanted to easily be able to refer back to dishes that I enjoy making, and I wanted to capture playful nuances or advice from friends, family, and myself. While I take my practice of cooking seriously overall (just so seriously, y'all), I’m nothing without a bit of play and chaos. The current set of recipes are more on the simpler side, I’d say, and what I’m currently making for myself often. And finally, diary entries. I love to get to know a chef/someone both through their food and their thoughts, ideas, and processes around food. I was documenting much of this in my written journal, but why not share it? And not only the serious but include a bit of everything, from leaving myself a grocery list as a record of what I was thinking about that day, to a simple list of practices that are bringing me joy, to longer form posts with a bit more intention and thought.

In short, I wanted a singular place to write it all down, share pictures, visualize it, and maybe make it easy for someone else to join along the way.

What you see here today is Version 1.0. At some point, I’d like to add:

• An index or glossary of some kind
• A changelog
• Any adaptations that might come with more recipes and entries
  • I’m thinking that eventually, with more recipes added, there might be a way to group them together, either by season (when I first uploaded them) or by some other metric, like difficulty.
• Pictures for every recipe!
• An image gallery
• Secret things that haven’t occurred to me yet!

But for now, this is it.

If you’d like to support, please share this website with a friend, and visit often. At the moment, I don’t know if I’ll ever have a newsletter, as that seems beside the point. This is a project I’d like to keep playful and simple, occasionally chaotic, and an all-around source of joy.

If you’d like to support monetarily, I’d appreciate that, as well, though I don’t have a system set up for that at the mo. You’re welcome to email me, and I can share my Venmo. Even a lil dollar or two a month will help keep this running financilally in the long run. I currently pay $29/month to keep it running, with yearly costs like URL and one-off costs like licensing the font for this website. Cause fonts!!

In case you’re wondering, there is no other thing – no Instagram, no promotions, no nothing. Just a little website for people to discover on their own. Of course, you’re welcome to find me on Are.na or Instagram, if you’d like, and if you can ;)

Em Estrada

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*To commemorate my late grandmother’s birthday, who passed in October of this year.

A note on presentation and order:

Many of the items on this site are presented in random order. Outside of the presentation of the calendared diary page, everything else is presented in random order. At the top of the diary page, there is a random picture presented, as well, from somewhere on the website.