onward, with gratitude

There's a scene in the fourth season of Mad Men where Sterling Cooper Draper Price just lost its biggest client and the agency is floundering, so Peggy marches into Don's office and gives him a pep talk. She tells him to change the name of the agency, just like they would if a product wasn't selling. Change the brand. Start fresh.

Earlier this year I wrote about change and the urge I was feeling to reconnect with some books I hadn't visited in a long time. When I look back on the almost four years I've written Cooking After Five, I realize it's made me into a home cook. Though I was full of enthusiasm, I knew far less about cooking when I began and made plenty of mistakes (like over-reducing balsamic vinegar and nearly burning down my kitchen making mozzarella sticks). Cooking After Five also helped me find my voice, which is why I believe I'm ready to move forward with a new project. The time is right, I can feel it.

I've decided to channel my voice into a new forum by turning Eat This Poem, the series I recently started here, into its own blog. For this reason, I hope that for most of you, this is not goodbye. I'm still blogging, cooking and welcoming you to join me in my little corner of the web. I just changed the name, changed the brand. There's a whole world of literature out there dedicated to food, hunger and the idea of nourishing our bodies and minds. It's just waiting to be adapted to our kitchen! I'll read poetry (and a little prose, too) and create recipes inspired by it.

The very cool design blog conference Alt Summit took place recently, and as I followed along with its hashtag, a tweet caught my eye:

@apartment_34 Erin Hiemstra
You've got to stay true to your passion but also your content. You can't blog about everything Curation is key. #AltSummit

This articulates one of the reasons why I'm transitioning into a blog format that I believe will allow me to do just that. As much as I want to tell you about the perfect black bean chili to make for Super Bowl Sunday, there are about 500 other bloggers telling you something similar. I want to share content with you that is new, refreshing and as inspirational as it is edible. While I realize the combination of literature and food is not for everyone, I hope that many of you will continue supporting me as you have over the past few years. I really, really appreciate it.

For the time being, Cooking After Five will still be here. I may write a post or two, just to ease myself into the transition, so the blog will still be here for a good long while if you need it.

Please stop by and say hello, like me on Facebook, and add the new RSS feed to your reader.

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, I'll also be changing my handle to better consolidate my "personal brand" online. But it's still me, I can assure you of that.

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thoughts on pizza

I first went to Pizzeria Mozza for lunch in 2009. It was my birthday, and a group of colleagues decided to make the drive from Century City to Hollywood for the occasion. Since then, Nancy Silverton's pizza has been the standard of comparison for every other restaurant. Knowing this, it should come as no surprise that I pre-ordered the Mozza cookbook as soon as I learned about it, for the sole purpose of having her somewhat-modified-for-home-kitchens pizza recipe.

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all so refreshing

What is it about this time of year that makes us want to start fresh? It's not the same back to school feeling of September, either. It's not new pencils and homework assignments and blank notebooks, because all of that is routine. Your life begins and ends with the school bell, and while it's a new year, a new grade and a new teacher, it's more of the same. A comfortable routine. Right now, I'm talking about actual change. New ideas. Clearing out the physical and mental clutter. Making lists of tasks that will refresh and inspire us. Achievable, for the most part, so come March we aren't completely disappointed with ourselves.

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eat this poem | "baskets" by louise gluck

It's a somewhat sorrowful beginning, so I apologize I couldn't start the year with a more sprightly piece. There is, however, beauty in the sadness, so much in fact, that the speaker asks the question directly, "How much beauty / can a person bear?"

You'll hear that word a lot here. Speaker. It might seem like the writer and the speaker are interchangeable, but I assure you they are not. It's one of the first lessons I learned in my graduate school workshops. The person sitting across from you may have written the poem, but you can't make assumptions. In some cases, of course, they are the same person, but to maintain some consistency for the sake of discussion, the speaker will be speaking and the writer will be writing.

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new series | eat this poem

If we're being technical, literature came before food, at least in my world. I've been writing since I learned how to hold a pen. I read voraciously. I had a creative writing teacher in high school that shoved Anne Sexton's Collected Poems on my desk and told me to write my report on her. I edited the literary magazine in high school, went to "a graduate school for undergraduates" within a larger university (I once had a workshop with all of 6 people), studied abroad in London to follow in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens, then went on to get an MFA, my goal since I was 16 years old, for which I blame my creative writing teacher for putting the idea in my head.

It recently occurred to me that it's been exactly five years since I graduated from my MFA program. Time flies. I got married, started working my way up the career ladder, learned to cook, started a novel (that remains unfinished), started this food blog, and tried my best to keep up writing poetry as much as I had before, but it gradually faded. Actually, about the same time that I was writing less poetry, I was starting my food blog. Funny how that works. At first it bothered me, how little I was writing, but because reading and writing have been urges since I was about eight years old, I knew that they ebbed and flowed in my life. When I needed it again, I would feel it.

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