Guess who’s back, back again?

Mel is back!  Tell a friend.  And yes, I’m totally paraphrasing Eminem (13 year old Mel would be soooo proud – that song was the shit).  So anyway, hello there.  If anybody’s still there?  After six months of silence, I doubt anybody still follows Sharky Oven Gloves, but hey, one never knows.

Just in case somebody is still hanging around, desperately hoping that I might rock up again (because obviously, why wouldn’t you?), I do apologise for my abrupt and unexplained disappearance.  I wasn’t planning on taking such a massive blogging break.  Actually, I wasn’t planning on taking a break at all…

I started Sharky Oven Gloves because I wanted somewhere to gather together my favourite recipes, as well as an outlet for all my food chat.  Along the way I discovered the food blogging community.  And it was wonderful.  For a while.  About a year ago, I began to notice a few bloggers with a bit of a toxic attitude.  And I ignored it.  But that attitude began to permeate across the “blogosphere” and I became increasingly dispirited by how out-of-touch certain food bloggers sounded and by the number of reviews that were beginning to appear that were clearly just an avenue to get further freebies or of products completely irrelevant to food blogs (like… holidays or ferry routes, excuse me what?) that were beginning to appear.  In fact, it made me angry.

Quite frankly, I became so completely disenchanted that I decided to step away for just a week or so and take a few deep breaths.  But as more and more of those suspiciously-positive (a cynic might even say PR-arse-licking…) reviews clogged up my Feedly, my short break of a few weeks turned into a month… two months… and suddenly six months.  Oh.  Woops.  But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been spending time in the kitchen – meals were still cooked, cakes were still baked and jam was still made.

I just didn’t have the enthusiasm to blog about any of them – between taking photos, editing them and writing up posts, blogging eats up a lot of time.  And because my heart wasn’t really in it anymore, blogging became a chore.  Taking full advantage of it being summer and living in a coastal idyll was a much more inviting use of my time.  Also the whole PhD thing.

Over the last few months, I’ve made some changes – I’ve unfollwed those toxic bloggers, which I should have done sooner.  Way sooner.  For some reason, I felt that I should follow the big bloggers because they were important in some way.  Well guess what?  They’re not.  I’m not saying that because I’m a tiny little blogger, but because following a blog that irks me is not healthy, and I don’t gain anything good from it.  At all.  (Rocket science, I know.)  Consequently, I’ve been looking for blogs written by lovely, genuine people.  I’ve found several really great NZ-based blogs, but all suggestions of other blogs to check out are welcome!  I also feel revitalised, and once I’m back into the swing of things properly, I’m going to try to get more involved in the NZ food blogging scene.  Because it just makes sense – lovely people in the same country as me = no-brainer.

So there you go, a little explanation of my sudden disappearance.  No recipe today, but look out for one next week.

In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your day, wherever you are in the world!