TL;DR: Welcome to my blog. It’s gonna be about whatever I feel like, but there will probably be a lot of food.
It’s been probably about nine years in the making. Well, definitely not the making. Let’s call it a twinkle in my eye. THE BLOG.
I’ve been wanting to blog about various subjects, random interests really, for close to a decade. I’m a top tier procrastinator so that’s a big reason I’ve never gotten started. I also had the problem of not being consistently interested in one or two activities enough to blog about them exclusively. Well, except food. I am very interested in food. But I didn’t want to start a blog about food and not have the freedom to diverge into other fields. So I put it off.
Years went by. My brother harangued me for so long about starting a food blog that it became a running joke. Whenever my SO and I went to a new restaurant he’d ask if we put the review up on the blog yet. Clever names came and went (without being written down, and now I kick myself for that). Recently, I left my job. I started thinking more seriously about starting the blog. After all, now I had more free time to devote to such a venture. I continued to put it off.
I need to stop this boring introduction for a little backstory. A few years ago, I discovered that you can mark a place on Google Maps with a little gold star. I already had a few restaurants in the back of my mind that I wanted to check out. Getting a list of anything floating around in my head onto paper or digital saved format is always good. So I began saving. And saving. I started complaining about the lack of organization with this system at least two years ago because the list was growing out of hand.
a small taste of my saved places (when you zoom in the stars multiply!)
Even today, I’m still saving. Sometimes when I zoom in on a neighborhood and click on a star, I’m told the restaurant is permanently closed.
It's gotten so bad that sometimes I find out about an upcoming restaurant and when I go to save it, there's already a restaurant I saved at that address, permanently closed...so I have to add a "tag" with the pertinent info
My friends have joked that I’m a real-life Stefon (for those of you not familiar), in the sense that I always have some new restaurant or bar (or something sort of in-between the two) to tell them about that, for example, I’ve found through Instagram via a commenter on a post of a bartender of another restaurant which I’m following.
Back to my back story…Just before Christmas, my SO and I decided to start going out consistently once per week (on a weekday, both to avoid bigger crowds and to avoid making dinner) to a restaurant on my list. This was my chance! Time to start this fucking thing once and for all.
But something held me back.
What if I want to write about sewing? Or the band? (I’m in a band.) Or share a recipe? Travel post? A “What Really Grinds My Gears” special segment? A restaurant review (or even general food) blog doesn’t allow all these topics in a regular rotation. So I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate all of my interests into one blog and (the hardest part) trying to come up with a good name.
If you know me, you know that I have the speed of a sloth. I have to give the condiments to my SO first when we’re making sandwiches, etc., because I take too long “Picasso-ing” my ingredients. I can tell you, in the last two months the best name I came up with was “The Long-Order Cook”, because it once took me nearly three hours to make a Rachael Ray 30-minute meal. But that wasn’t good enough. I wanted something more all-encompassing. And that’s how I landed here. The Pantless Pantologist. Just posting about whatever new skill I’m currently working on or interesting tidbit I’ve picked up, whenever and whatever I feel like. Plus the restaurant reviews and recipes.