Apr13
Housekeeping at Cooking Out Of The Box
So, have you ever jumped into the deep end without thinking about how deep the water was, how cold it might be, or even if you know how to swim?
For the last several years I’ve had a vision of where I want to take my various food and cooking related interests. As I’ve gotten a “great” idea, I’ve jumped into it and made it so.
- I have Madison Dining Online (MadisonDining.com). I’ve had that site for 12 years now. Yes, 12 years. That’s really old in Internet years. MDOL gets hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.
- I’ve made Cuisine Capers (CuisineCapers.com), a broad culinary blog that has mainly been recipe oriented. It’s been around for about 5 years and gets almost as much traffic as Madison Dining Online.
- I’ve made Cooking Out of the Box, this blog, to focus specifically on CSA programs, Farmers Markets, fresh produce and cooking seasonally. And the reason that I chose to do this on a blog separate from Cuisine Capers is because I am in the midst of a book, and I wanted to keep it separate from my overall blog - I wanted to focus specifically on this subject matter in a dedicated space.
Of course, this tends to make one the victim of their great ideas. And anyone who tried to follow this blog last year knows that it became just another ghost in the afterlife of the Internet because I basically abandoned it midseason. That’s because I didn’t have a clear strategy on how all of the different focuses that I envisioned played together. So I’d become paralyzed with indecision (do I do that HERE, or THERE?). Cuisine Capers has suffered, and Cooking Out of the Box flatlined completely. Madison Dining, on the other hand, is thriving and changing, become a much more dynamic, exciting initiative in ways that we did not think it would when we first conceived the notion 12 years ago.
In the past, I was very concerned with hiding the identity behind the sites and blogs. I didn’t want my name splashed around officially with any of them - I wanted to create nice, anonymously driven initiatives. Additionally, I didn’t want anyone connecting the blogs together. If you were a MDOL reader, I didn’t want you to know that I was also Cuisine Capers. If you were a Cuisine Capers fan, I wanted there to be no connection in your mind that I was also MDOL.
Don’t ask me why. I’m sure it made perfectly good sense to me at the time.
But, as MDOL and Cuisine Capers began to take on lives of their own, inevitably my identity was “outed” in many ways. Some of my Cuisine Capers works were published in a real book, under my real name. The local Madison, Wisconsin media began to publish my real name in connection with both Madison Dining Online and Cuisine Capers. I was really unsettled at first, until the more my real identity began to surface, the more my initiatives started to become more successful and visible.
The brutal winter that we’re just now pulling out of afforded me the opportunity to sit back and think about overall strategy, what I want to really do with these initiatives, and how they need to change so that they all thrive and don’t suffer at the expense of the others. And somewhere along the line I had an epiphany on how this needs to work. I’ve been discussing this in depth with my partner on Madison Dining Online and Cuisine Capers. I’ve been mulling it over at home and bouncing around ideas there.
So I will be slowly but steadily shifting the focus of some of my initiatives in hopefully a seamless way.
- Madison Dining Online will continue to move ahead, almost organically. It has begun to take on a life of its own and thrive. I have ideas on how to help make it even more dynamic.
- Cooking Out of the Box will become a more focused recipe site, and it will be where I turn to write about cooking with the freshest possible ingredients specifically, and other cooking as well.
- Cuisine Capers will become more focused on commentary, product reviews and test, book reviews, with lots of recipes thrown in along the way, of course.
- CulinaryMadison.com will be created to aggregate all three of these entities together - I’m no longer going to try to hide the affiliations.
And I’m not going to go out of my way to hide the identity behind the sites.
Irene Cash
Cooking Out of the Box, Cuisine Capers, Madison Dining Online, Culinary Madison