Kat Kelly – As we introduce The Recipe Collective via Feeding and Feelings to the digi-world, we of course want to consider the good, the bad, the ugly. While most publishers are all about generating pageviews, engagement, likes, and stickiness, we see ourselves as part of the very fabric of the future of storytelling.
We want Vexteo’s content to be part of the story, not the fly paper to keep you hanging out for hours. Although, if you’re finding stuff you like, please come in and hang out for a while!
One of the things that we often think about is how to navigate a paperless future with making sure we have tangible records; things that you can touch, feel, experience. Without those things, we may have a couple of “lost generations.”
Maybe I’m just obsessive….OK, I admit I am obsessive…but I think about our lost history a great deal. What happens when all of the places where we have been storing and sharing our lives go away? Digital scrapbooks are great, but we really need to keep a little something that we can truly feel.
A perfect example would be recipe books. Do you have a recipe book? The kind that you’ve cut out, handwritten, and stored in a picture book, box, or file? I’m all over the place with mine. I had about five different ones. Then I got on the “go paperless” bandwagon. Then I realized, that’s messy in the kitchen.
Today, I’m a hybrid. What does that mean? It means I have piles of paper recipes around the kitchen, a Pinterest page full of recipes, an Evernote recipe page for our family, and I still go out to eat almost every day.
This brings me back to my mom. Those of you who have read any of my stuff know that my mom was a really huge part of my life. For all of the struggles of that relationship, it hit me harder than I ever imagined when I lost her.
In the months (and now years) that followed, I wanted to spend my time grieving and celebrating simultaneously. I’m now at a place where I am able to go through her things without crying sometimes.
One of the most awesome things about this process has been learning who she really is. Thanks to her and to Anna’s amazing Cajun family delicacies, The Recipe Collective was born. Sure, we’ll have great stuff here to try. And we hope you will share stories and recipes handed down through your families. But, ultimately, The Recipe Collective is about us sharing stories around the foods that bring us together. It’s about the memories, the history, the way food connects us.
With that in mind, welcome to the virgin post for this new concept. Thanks for reading it. Oh, and the image on this piece is a scan of just a few of the envelopes that I found in my mom’s recipe box. It makes me giggle to see her mission critical food groups and how she sorted her recipes into the following different envelopes: pies/cheesecakes, chicken, fruit, brownies/cookies, fish/seafood, cakes/frostings, sandwich fillings, gelatins/relish, fondue/soups.
Goodness, I love my mom. Seeing these make me smile just thinking about how her brain worked. Welcome to #TheRecipeCollective. Come in, sit a spell, share a story or two, and if you cook anything, let us know via Facebook or Twitter!
Kat Kelly is the founder of Vexteo and she loves a good story and a good recipe. She thinks it’s even better when she can get both.
