Most of what follows was not planned. Each change came from the same place: something on the site was not working well enough, and fixing it properly meant changing how we do things.
A place to put the recipes friends kept texting me for, so I could send one link instead of retyping the same instructions every week.
Bread, soup, and anything built from pantry staples. It was also the year the readers stopped being people I knew.
Recipes started describing what to look for instead of only how long to wait, and older posts were rewritten to match.
The site outgrew one person. Another writer joined, and every recipe began carrying the name of whoever wrote it.
Each writer took a fixed part of the site instead of writing across everything, and a named editor started checking every post before it went live.
Working out how a restaurant gets a particular flavor is a different job, so copycat recipes moved to their own site and this one stayed focused on everyday cooking.
The site had grown past the structure it started with. Categories were rebuilt so every recipe sits somewhere sensible: chicken thighs under chicken, bundt cakes under cakes, sourdough under baking. The pages were redesigned around what people actually do here, which is follow instructions while holding a pan.