Today marks the five year anniversary of this blog! Five years ago CK and I had just moved in together, I’d left a job I hated with every fiber of my being, and had rekindled my love of blogging (in between endless resume submissions) with a now defunct service called Vox. I’ve talked about the fact that I’ve been blogging (aka journaling as we called it back then) online since 1999 before, but for some reason I left out the details in my bio as to how ErinCooks.com actually came into existence.
One night, for some unknown reason, I took step-by-step photos of the preparation of Ellie Krieger’s Chicken Cacciatore. At that time I didn’t read food blogs and I’m pretty certain that I didn’t even know they existed. I almost exclusively read personal blogs, most of which I’d been reading for years. So, anyway, I had these photos of me making dinner and being the good little blogger that I am I promptly put them up on my Vox account and called it a wrap. I can’t show you the actual post unfortunately as the Wayback Machine is not cooperating, but I do have a screenshot of the ErinCooks.com catalyst. You see, shortly after posting those step-by-step images my story was featured on the front page of Vox under their infamous “This is Good” section. Or as I like to think of it: the original “Like” button.
This seriously made my year and random people commented on the post and left lovely comments and I thought…hmm…maybe I could do that all the time? At first I tried using another Vox account to just post pictures of things I was baking and cooking, but that didn’t really seem to be enough. Plus I missed owning my own domain. So in the end I took the title of my food post account on vox (ErinCooks) and bought the .com. The chicken post was of course the first entry on ErinCooks.com. And no one commented on it. Thankfully things did improve with time though.
Over the last five years I’d have to say that some of my most proud moments included:
- Being featured on the front page of Boston.com (twice)
- The epic StumbleUpon traffic that made my Raised Doughnut post one of the most viewed items on the blog to date
- Having the Baked Sweet Potato Latkes linked from a New York Times blog (and having people freak out about the fact that they were baked)
- When Serious Eats posted about my Mojito Pound Cake
- Seeing my image from Crescent Ridge Dairy in a Food & Wine online slideshow
Thank you all so much for sharing these memories with me! Please know that your kind words and encouragement have meant more to me then you’ll ever know.