Release Notes

Welcome! It's nice to meet you. I'm Mel.

I made this site first and foremost for the purpose of commemorating my mom (and her passion for cooking / baking), but also with a secondary goal of finding a healthy way to process residual grief. It's been almost five years since I could call my mom on the phone, and while memories come and go in waves, cooking always makes me think of her. As two headstrong individuals, our relationship had its bumps, but I knew I could always call to see what specific brand of cocoa powder a recipe needed, or to double check the right way to measure brown sugar.

When thinking back about what defined my mom, a clear theme was her prioritization of connection over efficiency. When entertaining, she took pride in baking from scratch, even making things she remembered that specific people enjoyed to eat. After getting cancer and going into remission, she made herself available to those who received a similar diagnosis and didn't know where to start, for the one-on-one conversations. She made room for honest discussion of fear and hope.

Building this site gave me a chance to revisit memories, and to appreciate how we grew over time. It also gave me room to think about who I want to be, and what actions I can take.

We live in an exciting age of technology, where more and more feels possible with the help of AI. People who don't know how to draw feel like they can conjure illustrations from their words, and people who don't know how to code have access to tooling that makes technology bend closer to their whims. I've noticed that while AI can open new, exciting doors and make it easier than ever to take action, it can also make doing something "the long way" feel like a foolish luxury. Fear and hope are central to the discourse around AI, as we all examine where AI can make our lives better (and where caution is rightly due). In the spirit of learning from my mom's best qualities, I too would like to cultivate space for one-on-one conversations, especially on the nuanced things (like AI) and how they relate to our hopes and fears.

I don't think AI is unilaterally "good" or "bad," but I wanted to use this project to pay homage to the idea that doing things "the long way" can be meditative and rewarding. Reading recipes, drawing elements, and even data labeling for this site — has given me space to sit with my grief. I learned a new software (hello Affinity Designer) and connected new dots in my brain (pushing the bounds on my ideas of how to interlock CMS architecture). Sure, I could do it faster with a little help from AI, but similar to baking brownies from raw ingredients (over a box mix), I wanted to push myself further, to make this from scratch.

Ultimately, I am proud of the site I made, and the things I learned in doing so. I am excited to be able to share my mom's recipes with the world, and to use this site to create my own flavor of community (shout out to my friends who shared recipes in the secret menu). If this site feels meaningful to you, I'd love to hear about it. If you have a recipe you'd like to share, there is a form for that in the hamburger menu. If we haven't talked in a while and you want to chat (whether it's about your latest hypothesis on AI and the state of the design industry, or you just want to tell me about a great cornbread recipe you stumbled upon), my inbox is open.