chicken soup for summer colds

no, it's not a Home Movie

Hello! You may notice this is NOT a Home Movies newsletter. Starting this week, we are scaling back to an every-other-week, a.k.a. bi-weekly, a.k.a. twice a month release schedule. This is mostly because, to be frank, we are burnt out and one recipe a week is a lot! Too many, perhaps!

But also, I have a book due this year and, well, books simply do not write themselves. 

Thank you, as always, for your support, your enthusiasm, your time, and your attention. We here at Home Movies are so thrilled to get to be making these lil home movies for you and can’t wait to make more (and we are making more!). 

If you’re here for the chicken soup, scroll down. If you’re here for the vulnerability, read on! 

Last June, I started this newsletter as a way to get my recipes out into the world while I waited to go back to my job. Yada yada yada, and…this became my job! This newsletter. A Newsletter! Eventually, I took the newsletter and turned them into videos. We called those videos Home Movies. What a beautiful thing, to be able to work for yourself, to write how you feel and what you feel, to cook what you want and how you want. It has never ever escaped me how wonderful that is, and I am grateful every single day that it gets to be my job. 

But as anyone who “Creates Content” (which, I guess is now just how we refer to any work that lives on the internet? Sorry, I hate it!), you also get to know the ins and outs of The Algorithm. The Comments Section. Occasionally, The Tweets and The Articles, even though I try not to read those 🥴. You realize you’re working for yourself, but not really, because there’s also all of the above.

If you don’t post with the right frequency, you cease to exist and swirl into the abyss of the internet, for you have starved The Algorithm and it has gone elsewhere to feed. If you write too personally, someone will complain that “the ratio of Alison Roman to recipes is off” in your newsletter even though, well, it is your newsletter. If you include recipes from your cookbooks in your videos, people complain there’s no “new content,” even though YouTube is free. If you try to make a new recipe each week, you burn yourself out and fail to make things you’re truly proud of. If you put out two newsletters a week to provide value, people unsubscribe because there are “too many emails.” If you scale back to once a week to avoid clogging the inbox, people unsubscribe because there “isn’t enough content.” Etc, etc, etc, forevermore.

This isn’t meant to sound whiny, just a glimpse into the real-time processing as I, a person who lives to please people, tries to please every person. But not just people, algorithms! Who don’t even have personal traumas which excuse some of their shitty behavior! But guess what: You simply can not! Some people have figured this out much earlier in life.

Anyway, I love working. I love writing, I love making videos, I love cooking. But I think last year, I tried to bounce back so quickly that I didn’t really give myself time to ask myself what I was bouncing back for. Doing The Most as a way to prove (to myself, mostly) how “okay” I was has very much started to catch top with me. Maybe you feel the same way? 

*Extreme Carrie Bradshaw voice* Powering through the pandemic has been a huge coping mechanism for many, and just like my phone at all times, it feels like our collective batteries are hovering around 2%.

I am the biggest advocate of “it’s okay to not be okay,” but I never really felt like it was publicly okay to say: “I’m not that okay!” Holding myself to a different standard than anyone else: Classic Virgo behavior! What a curse.

Anyway, while I feel like I have lost my way a little, the thing that I know I still do want to do (and hope to be doing): Cook. Write. Perhaps more specifically, write with honesty and purpose, write recipes that people like because they taste great, look nice and work with a wide variety of kitchens and ingredients. Scaling back one of the 93 things I’m trying to do right now is my way of hopefully making everything else that much better. It’s 2021, less is more!

So, did you want a recipe for that chicken soup? Ennui optional but recommended! Just kidding, I don’t recommend the ennui. 

Hallie Parker