Or Take a Look at One of Ellie’s Older Projects
Or Back When Ellie Was More Active in the Kitchen
Lately I’ve been feeling the old itch to experiment in the kitchen again. I miss looking up recipes, compiling careful grocery lists, and hunting down obscure ingredients like they were treasure. I miss looking through the worn, loved cookbooks I bought off eBay and from the antique mall.
Most of all, I just miss the quiet magic of mixing ingredients together and watching them become something that hadn’t existed before. Strangely enough, I even miss the projects that grew out of those culinary ventures—the planning, documenting, the sense that I was building something worthwhile.
Enough preamble. During that desperate, brain-fogged chapter of my life, I conjured a blog to give myself something to look forward to—something for my meager paycheck to nurture beyond the usual drain of bills. Brainpie was my baby, and even a lifeline at times.
It’s also one of the few projects that I can look back on without feeling shame or disappointment. It isn’t perfect, even after I’d spent a year combing through every post to improve the grammar and correct mistakes. But perfection was never the point. I simply wanted to create and share, and it remains one of the rare projects I loved regardless of whether anyone else noticed.
I’m still proud of it. And I’m sharing it with you today.
No, I’m not hearing the call back to culinary adventure. I mean, I do get a whisper every now and then. Not a summons. More like a tap on the shoulder. “Be ready when I come back.”
I don’t know what this means, but revisiting Brainpie has made me miss those days more than I expected. The creativity, the curiosity, the courage to make mistakes and chuckle at them—and even eat them. It was a time when drawing comics and writing fiction were starting to lose their shine, and Brainpie was the quiet reassurance that I could still create, no matter how tired or uninspired I felt.
Maybe that was the blog’s purpose during its heyday. But now that it’s popping up more in my thoughts… well, I’ll just have to see what its purpose may eventually be.