miketriesanewrecipe …I had an idea.
Back in 2018, my son was entering his senior year in college. While he had been away at campus each year, he had lots of opportunities to try different dishes, and when he was home I would sometimes hear him lament over how we kept having the same basic foods for dinner over and over again (call it the “Hamburger Helper mentality” I suppose – simple, cheap, and easy to fix).
After he left in August for the fall semester, I decided to prove to him (and myself, I suppose) that I could cook a wider variety of foods. I’d made a few family dishes over the years on special occasions, which was a good place to start, but I wanted to take it a step further and try others I’ve never cooked before. My goal was to be able to impress him with my cooking skills when he returned in December for the semester break.
And so, in September 2018 I started this new adventure. I decided to try out one new dish each week on Sundays. I posted my first dishes on my personal Facebook page, with a brief description and a photo. When friends asked me for a copy of the recipe, I either sent it to them or (if it came from someplace online) I posted a link to it. I branched out to Instagram, posting my photos and comments there (which updated Facebook at the same time), and I turned to Pinterest for most of my recipe searches each week.
I also came up with a hashtag to help locate the dishes I’d posted – #miketriesanewrecipe. It seemed to make sense when I created it – after all, I really was trying a new recipe each week. You can use that hashtag on Facebook any time you want to see all the recipes I’ve ever posted about.
Fast forward a couple of years and a hundred or so different dishes later, and even with the help of that hashtag I was starting to find myself losing track of all the different dishes I’d prepared. Navigating back through Pinterest to get to each website where the recipe was posted was a bit of a pain, too… and in most cases, the sites are so heavily monetized you have to spend time every few minutes closing off all the popup videos and other floating advertising just to see the recipe.
That got me to thinking… what if I collected all the recipes I’ve tried in one place to make them easier to find? And I’m not interested in using the web as my primary source of income (like those other sites seem to be), so I can make it much cleaner and easier for anyone to view the recipes. Sounded like a good plan!
And so, here we are with my new website… and what better name to give it than Mike Tries a New Recipe.
It’s going to take a while for me to get the backlog of recipes I’ve tried loaded up, and I’ll be posting updates along the way. But, when I’m all caught up you should be able to navigate and find every dish I’ve tried, with very clear and easy to read (or download or print) directions. On the blog page (this page), I’ll still give you some intro about each dish – and I promise it won’t include reading my entire life story each time.
And as for my son, he seems pleased with my progress…