Let's go Veganuary, 2023 (and a quick 2022 retrospective)
A retrospective of 2022, perspectives for 2023, and a word about Veganuary.
Hello, this is Guillaume, wishing you a delightful year 2023. This post contains no recipes; instead, I write about the past year, and the one to come.
Looking backward: a retrospective of 2022
I was busy working, and cooking a lot during the last couple of weeks. We hosted family for Christmas, and we cooked to delight them — the bare minimum anyone can expect when visiting us! Although not being typical of our country, nor of the season, I cooked dishes from the Indian sub-continent: a vegetable biryani rice, and an aloo baingan bharta. Actually, I cooked mostly Indian dishes during the last two months — I’m fond of such cuisine, in case you didn’t know.
When I started Guillaume Cooks Vegan in February 2022, my intent was to continue sharing recipes with former team mates, in a more organized way, and with better formatting than what our Telegram group offered. I had just started a career break, and one of my early supporters pointed that I would then have time to write, and share my recipes. My initial plan was to publish on Instagram (as @guillaume_vg), however it derailed from the start, when I faced the 2,200-character limit of posts. I’m glad I moved to Substack, which made it easy for me to write (formatted) drafts of posts, schedule them, and share links to them — things I’m unable to achieve with Instagram out-of-the-box. I still use Instagram, to relay posts from the newsletter, and engage with some of you who react to content.
As a vegan, I also wished to be part of the community: I support associations, and I feed the giant Internet with delicious (I hope) vegan recipes. I recall a restaurant owner telling me running this business was his way of promoting veganism — writing, and sharing recipes is mine.
Some metrics
As of today, Guillaume Cooks Vegan lists 29 recipes. I have published weekly from February, 22nd to August, 9th, then monthly starting September, 4th. I announced the change in the publication pace in a thread started mid-August, where I explained the rationale for switching from weekly to monthly. I polled the readers about publishing other articles than recipes, while still related to cooking; it received a massive 100% “yes”, though from 4 votes — thank you, the 4 voters! I haven’t yet written non-recipes posts, beside the thread I mentioned, and the present article — I’ve at least one idea of such post, see further below. The change in publication proved to be very wise, given this allowed me to launch another newsletter, Arranged ROMs, on a totally different topic. It would have become necessary anyway, as I returned to employment in November — this was both unexpected, and an awesome opportunity I couldn’t disregard.
Since I continue to browse for new recipes to experiment with, I realized how low-quality my pictures were — regarding composition as well as lighting. Without proper lighting, the pictures I shoot are dependent on the outside weather, and there were times I regretted the clouds coming, then leaving as the ingredients pictured before and after preparation could hardly be related to the same recipe — alright, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, here. I tried to enhance the lighting from November, with a different setup; I’m especially proud of the result for French petit salé, with Le Puy Green lentils, though I don’t know if it made a difference for you, readers. It takes a bit more time to prepare the kitchen, though I’m glad it doesn’t cost extra money.
Today, the newsletter has 43 subscribers, a number which grew slowly and steadily over time:
As anticipated, the first subscribers were people I knew, and who I advertised the existence of. The 10th subscriber was a surprise, as they were the first I didn’t know. Today, there are around 20 subscribers I met in the past, the rest are strangers — I’m so happy you’re here! I’m both humbled by the small number of subscribers, and by the fact there are so many people interested in my content at the same time.
The last 10 articles have received 51.8 views in average. Substack stats confirm there are other readers than the ones subscribed to the newsletter. Some found Guillaume Cooks Vegan from Substack itself (including from the sweet recommendation of the awesome Arielle, who writes no frills vegan), Web searches (DuckDuckGo, Google, Yahoo — yes, in this order of importance), Instagram, or from my LinkedIn profile (I followed Substack’s advice to register as many links as possible to make content visible, even in unrelated place like professional social networks).
Looking forward: perspectives for 2023
Veganuary
If you’ve never heard about it, Veganuary is an initiative to invite people to eat vegan during the month of January — hence the name “Veganuary”. The first time I heard about it was in January 2019 when I went to London for a short trip. I was delighted to discover about Veganuary, especially while staying in such a vegan-friendly city. I prepared nothing special on Guillaume Cooks Vegan to celebrate Veganuary in 2023. I fantasized posting short articles weekly, though this falls short when I look at how busy January will be on the work side. Also, the downside of having cooked a lot during the end of 2022 is that my freezer is full, again. Do you remember I explained one tray of my freeze was “dal land” (in this post)? It’s gone (delightfully) worse, with other spicy delights stacking up one after the other. I’ve reached a point where I consider the likeliness of the freezer breaking as a “household operational risk”.
Setting expectations for this new year
Usually, people leverage on the new year to set goals for the twelve months to come — and I am no exception. Authors target to write more often, or aim at reaching an higher number of subscribers, or to finally go paid, or to advertise their work to more social networks, and so on… my goals are none of these. I give it a short thought, and although I enjoy shooting recipes I cook, writing them in the comfort of my couch, then reading feedback through miscellaneous online channels, I have zero incentives to change anything. I started writing for a hand of team mates, adding more vegan recipes to the content available online, and I decide to be satisfied with the current state. In the Ryōan-ji, one of my favorite zen temples (among few I visited), there’s a tsukubai whose kanjis form the sentence “ware, tada taru wo shiru”; this can be translated to “learn only to be content”. I’m grateful for, and satisfied with what Guillaume Cooks Vegan is today; although it could evolve, improve, I have no desire to invest, neither time nor energy, into it.
If I look at my article tracker (I kept good habits from my previous job!), I see 11 recipe ideas of my own listed, 2 BBC Good Food recipes which I veganized, a candidate article to tour some of the Indian spice premixes I fancy, and a post about cookware. There are recipes I’ve seen other people cook, and which I’m reluctant to cook with zero personal value-added; some readers told me it’s a point of view, and that making an existing recipe visible to another audience is beneficial to it. What’s a well-known recipe to me may be unknown to others.
Closing words
Although I’m writing for myself, and have expressed above my intent not to change this newsletter much, I’m open for suggestions — leave a comment below! Be it to ask for more of this, or that, share tips on photography, lighting, or other, the comment space is yours. This being said, I wish you all a great year 2023. And you can wish me the freezer doesn’t stop working!
Here’s a tip before you go
Vegan, vegetarian, carnist, and so on are labels people like to stick to others, or wear with pride. Of course, as a vegan, I praise and encourage those who follow such diet. Let me surprise you: I wasn’t born vegan. I became vegetarian, switched to vegan, returned to vegetarianism, and so on, with longer and longer periods of veganism. Whatever you do during Veganuary, be pragmatic. Rare will be the vegans judging you for trying the diet for a short period of time, then returning to your previous habits if you choose to — rare, and helping neither the movement, nor our planet, nor animals.