I thought I was way past it: that thing of avoiding doing something a little bit, and then a little bit more, and then again and yet again, until the thing you’ve left untended and the space of silent absence that surrounds it becomes magnified and more awkward to return to by the day. I’m like that wayward parent who skips out on a child’s rearing, not stepping back in until years later. That’s me, stepping back into this blog one year and seven months from my latest posting.

I just vanished. The truth is I succumbed to full-time job and then to magnified procrastination.

It’s not a coincidence that the date of my last posting coincides with the same week that I started a full-time+ work-from-home editing job. I don’t know how some people find the energy to blog regularly (when those blog postings include recipe testing and development, writing, and photography) and keep a full-time job, let alone have children or any kind of social life. It’s impressive! I don’t have children or a hugely active social life. No, it was working full-time at a job at home alone that requires sitting in front of a computer and making heavy use of my brain that made even the idea of sitting longer still in front of the computer to write and post those writings, rather than getting out and about and speaking other humans, entirely unappealing.

That was then and now, happily, I’ve been able to cut back a bit on my day-job hours, so I’m ready to end the vanishing game.

For the time being I will not be resurrecting the cookbook club exactly as it was when I lived in Vermont; instead I will write periodic postings about the food of my surroundings, the Piedmont region of Virginia and sometimes beyond (most likely with the compass pointed a little bit east or west or further south). Books will continue to play a big role; they are how I make my living, one of the things I love dearly in the material world, and one of the things I love to share with you.

I will leave the information about starting and running a cookbook club in place on the blog for others to use who (more…)

I have some club news—newsier news than the ongoing ebb and flow of members coming and going, and the cycling through of new cookbooks: The Dowdy Corners Cookbook Club will no longer be based out of Dowdy Corners. All else will remain the same: the name (when Steiglitz’s 291 gallery changed address from its location from its original address of 291 Fifth Avenue, he kept the name—so I am too); the growing list of members (Bhakti and Marianne being the most recent to join); and the club’s function—to explore new foods and cooking techniques with a group of likeminded passionate cooks who love cookbooks.

I could stop writing here, and this posting would truly be just an update on club news, and the shortest posting to date. Instead, it may become the longest bit of writing on this blog, except perhaps my posting last year about a trip to France, a place that encourages wordy praise. Aside from poetry, which I do not write, how is it possible to describe the impact of three life-changing years in 500 words or less, the length of a typical blog posting?

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The house at Dowdy Corners is a 1940s cape which, being built on an older (more…)

The Dowdy Corners Cookbook Club has finally begun, after thinking about it for more than a couple of years. Actually, a small group of interested friends, neighbors, and friends of friends, has already been reading and cooking from the club’s first cookbook Entice with Spice, a very accessible introduction to Indian home cooking. The launch of the DCCC blog has been a bit slower going, plagued, as I am, by a double handicap of technophobia and perfectionism. (I’m used to working on printed books, and so I have to remind myself that blogs are loops of on-going adjustment, feedback, adjustment, feedback . . . .) Plus there is a heck of a lot of difference between being a content provider and reacting to something that’s already out there. (I’m a book editor by trade, and I’ve always been sympathetic to authors when they say they’re stuck with a certain passage of text or section of a book—and the blank screen is facing them.)

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