Fifteen(!) years ago, Jeremy and I started a food blog.

Though it has occasionally sputtered to a halt for years at a time, it is still very much “going” (for some definition of going, I suppose). The original idea was to have a mixture of recipes, ingredient discussions, travel articles and restaurant reviews. But the restaurant reviews kind of fell by the wayside even before the pandemic put an end to our restaurant-going altogether. The last one was my post about Etxebarri from 2013, and it’s not so much a review as a love letter to a restaurant like no other.

To be fair, all of our reviews were love letters of a sort. It was never our aim to document all the places we ate or to write reviews of places we didn’t like. We wrote about the places we enjoyed, the places that we wanted to encourage other people to visit as well. I guess the longevity of the blog alone is responsible for the fact that many of the establishments we covered have since gone out of business. While some places have remarkable staying power, like The Mad Hatter (which has been running since we first moved to Brighton, though we haven’t been there for over a decade) and, thankfully, our beloved Unithai, other places are gone and much missed. They’re like a catalogue of our life in Brighton over the years.

We were regulars at Tallulah’s Tea Rooms and E-Kagen, two places we always took visitors and always recommended to others. The Greys once served what we considered to be the best steaks in town, long before The Coal Shed was so much as a gleam in anyone’s eye (The Greys was also the venue for what turned out to be one of my favorite Salter Cane gigs ). And Pintxo People was a great Spanish restaurant that punched above its weight, a place where I celebrated not one but two birthdays, before the owners ditched Brighton for London (and, as best I can tell, subsequently went out of business altogether). Loads of wonderful new restaurants have opened up since then, and the culinary scene in Brighton is quite different (and indeed better) than it once was. But I still get a pang of nostalgia when I think about those old places that were part of the fabric of our life here.

There was a time when I thought food writing might be my thing—like, my professional thing. About 10 years ago I was burned out on freelance “commercial” translating, with its tight deadlines and often vapid content, and I felt like something needed to change. I went off to South by Southwest in 2009 with a vague idea that I could try to turn food blogging into something more than just an occasional hobby. And I remember meeting folks in Austin and saying “I’m a food blogger” and they’d say “What’s your angle?” and I’d say “Um…food? Like…recipes and stuff?” and I realized that maybe my vague idea wasn’t ready for prime time after all (and also that I’m quite bored and annoyed by people who are constantly “angling”).

I kept writing about food anyway, just for the fun of it. And I kept translating press releases and quarterly reports, definitely not for the fun of it. And two years later I took on a terrifying interpreting job, and at that event I met a woman who had written a book, and I wound up translating that book. And the rest is (ongoing) history.

The food blog has languished somewhat since then, but it continues to hang on and there’s a lot of stuff there that I’m really proud of. A recipe I posted back in 2006 for a small roast pork for two is apparently the “most delicious small pork roast dish ever” (I’m not sure how much competition it has, but to be fair, that recipe does work—we tried it again recently after not cooking it for years and were like, “Huh, that’s actually really good!”). And the Belgian beef stew recipe I came up with a year later also continues to get occasional comments from happy cooks, including my favorite: “This is my favorite beef stew recipe of all time! I hope it stays on the internet forever.”

I hope so too. I have no intention of ditching Principia Gastronomica anytime soon, and I’ve actually updated it not once but twice this year. I’ve got a new post almost ready to go and a notebook full of scribbled recipes in various stages of testing. I’ve been cooking and writing more this year than I ever have, and while I very much wish the circumstances behind that were different, I’ll take the positives wherever I can.

I’ll leave you with a few popular recipes from the blog that will warm you up on a cold day:

Sausage ragu: There are no comments on this recipe, but I know that many of my friends cook this on a regular basis (as do Jeremy and I) because it is fast, cheap and extremely delicious.

Fast bean soup (vegan): This soup is the thing you want for lunch when it’s cold out and you know the sun is going to go down in, like, an hour.

Jeremy’s chili (vegan): Smoky and spicy, endlessly adaptable, and even if meat is your thing, you will not miss it here.

Côte de boeuf: If meat is very much your thing, this is the best way to cook a big bone-in ribeye or porterhouse. NB: I now use the “reverse sear” method, which involves browning the steak after it’s fully cooked and not before, but regardless of that, the low-and-slow cooking process is pretty much infallible if you’ve got a thick, well-marbled steak.

Bon appétit!