Paused for thinking

My first instinct would be to apologize for neglecting this blog as much as I have been these past few months, but I won't, because I haven't been posting for a reason. I needed a break from it, both for blog and non-blog related reasons. On the personal front, it's been a chaotic few months. I'm now settled in my new apartment with my lovely roommate, and I'm nearly done preparing for my first exam and already thinking about the next one--an immense amount of work nearly accomplished. My editing project has met with some serious crises, and we're still just figuring out how to solve those problems. My partner's mother passed away quite suddenly almost three weeks ago, and I'm now preparing for a 10-day learning trip to Victoria and Vancouver. All of those things aside, though, if I had really wanted to work on the blog, I could have found the time.

I didn't try to. And that's kind of the point here. I stopped feeling the incentive to make the time to write here, and I'm starting to figure out why. I think the blog needs a new focus, something that I'm hugely passionate about so that I continue to feel the desire and the excitement to share things with you. And the thing that I want to do the most, outside of spend time with the people in my life and do my job, is cook. I know that there's been a fair amount of food-related posting on here from the beginning, but it's time for a total change. Melissa's Miscellany is going to become a food blog. And not only that, but a natural-foods driven food blog. I'm not trying to become 101 Cookbooks, but cooking with whole foods, natural ingredients, and avoiding things like sugar and white flour have become extremely important to me. It's not even just because they're good for you--they present challenges in cooking and baking that I get such satisfaction out of rising to.

So that's my news for now. I'm doing a course on digital editing at UVic for the next week, and then I'm taking three days to check out Vancouver, and while I'm on the west coast, I'm going to do more thinking about how to make this change, and what this blog will look and function like going forward. I've already got some amazing recipes to share with you, like my chocolate-coconut-cherry layer cake, my whole-wheat linguine with shrimp, lemon, and greens, and some incredible orange-almond cookies (made without flour, sugar, or eggs). Upcoming recipes will include a pear-frangipane tart, vegan banana bread, gourmet popsicles (pineapple basil? lemon mint?), blood orange-almond cake, and more. Thanks for being patient with me--I promise that you'll be rewarded in the end with a great blog and a happy blogger. And if you're one of the people who knows me outside of the blogosphere (especially my partner and my roommate, my favourite taste-testers), I promise you this--you'll get fed .

--Melissa