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6 min read Newsletter

Wordloaf Year-in-Review 2021

no wonder I am so exhausted
Wordloaf Year-in-Review 2021
A page from Molly Reeder’s new 2022 calendar (buy one here!)

2021 was the first complete year of full-time freelance work for me, and MAN was it a busy one. I knew that already, given how non-stop it has all been, but until I looked back over the year this week, I had no idea just how productive I’d been, both here at Wordloaf and beyond. I thought it would be useful to catalogue the highlights all in one place, both for my reference and yours. (This is also a precursor to me finally updating the Wordloaf Index post, sorry about that.)

Topics

Here at the newsletter, I ranged over a wide variety of bready topics, including:

Guest Appearances & Book Chapters

Something I started to do here and there in 2021 was invite other people to contribute to Wordloaf. For 2022, I plan to make this a regular, at-least-monthly feature of the newsletter, and I have many more amazing people lined up to contribute. Each of the 2021 guest spots was linked to 2021 books that I loved so hard:

Recipes

I shared twenty-eight recipes here (not including the four more yet to come). TWENTY-EIGHT RECIPES! Back in my Cook’s Illustrated recipe-developing days, the most I ever completed in one year was thirteen. And that twenty-eight number doesn’t include the twenty-two I developed for other venues (listed below). Seven of the Wordloaf recipes remain subscriber-only, though others were originally shared as subscriber-exclusive previews but eventually became available to everyone.

Virtual Classes

I started teaching virtual baking classes this year, first using Airsubs (R.I.P.) and now using Ribbon. I plan to offer classes at least monthly in 2022, both through Ribbon and at other venues like King Arthur Baking Company, Edible Boston, and the Maine Grain Alliance. Videos for past classes are available to rent via the links below.

Writing and Recipes Elsewhere

Revenue from paid subscriptions here represents only about one-third of my total income, so despite this newsletter being pretty much a full-time endeavor, I still need to do loads of freelance writing and recipe developing to make up the difference. The good news is that every one of these assignments were things I wanted to work on.

Cook’s Illustrated

King Arthur

Serious Eats

Epicurious

Edible Boston

Stained Page News

Business Insider

Leite’s Culinaria

Awards

In June, Wordloaf was nominated for an IACP Award, in the Newsletter category. (In October, it did not win, but it was still an honor to be nominated.

Podcast Interviews

Despite generally hating to talk about myself, I appeared on two podcasts this year, and enjoyed doing both very much:

Rise Up! with Mark Dyck

From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy

Donations

I pledged to donate 10% of the proceeds of revenues from your subscription fees to organizations dedicated to fighting hunger and food insecurity. In 2021, we gave $1200 to Food For Free and $1200 to The Greater Boston Food Bank, two local organizations working to lessen food insecurity in my area. I those numbers will go up next year.

What’s in Store for 2022?

This post is too long already (so long that I couldn’t send it out as an email), so I’ll save the sneak previews for my first post of next year. But you can rest assured that my plan for ‘22 is to give you more of the same, but better!

As of now this newsletter has 6,160 subscribers and 725 paid members. That’s more than 10%, which is a very respectable number, I am told. To all of you who have signed up so far: Thank you so much.

If you are one of the remaining 5435 non-paying subscribers and you appreciate the work that I do here and elsewhere, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you can. I mean it when I say that it can’t be done without contributions from listeners just like you, and it is only $35 a year or $5 a month.

Subscribe now

—Andrew

Published by:

Andrew Janjigian

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