Whooooooaaaa so many feels, you guys. So many feels. First off, seriously, nothing is over. While I have been thinking of this moment in my head as “I’m ending Sauceome”, I’m not ending it. And even just the other day, Niles and I were at Longman & Eagle‘s pop-up sausage stand and all I could think about was how to turn the experience into a Sauceome comic. So nothing’s over.

But my schedule is packed, and it’s gotten to the point where every waking moment is spent working on something, and even WITH that, I’ve been sitting on the script for this new book for over a year and haven’t drawn a single page. I just need to free myself up from the schedule – I went from posting a comic five days a week, then three days a week, then two… I still want to keep Sauceome around, but I want to start making a Sauceome comic when I have something that I really want to write about, and not just to fill space every Monday and Friday.

I’ve had so many stressed out evenings trying to figure out what to write a Sauceome about lately that I kind of thought I would just be relieved, but all last week as I was making those sketchbook comics I felt very raw, very emotional, and I am not ashamed to say that I cried once or twice. This comic has been so important to me. All of you awesome people and your amazing support has been so important to me. When I started this three years ago, I really didn’t think it would be anything more than a personal vanity project. I never imagined the response it would get. These comics have been therapy for me. All of you have been therapy for me, and I’m so incredibly grateful for it all.

I want to say especially, everyone who emailed me privately about this comic, telling me that you were recovering from an eating disorder and that reading the comic was helpful to you, I LOVE YOU. Your emails changed me, and if my dumb little drawings helped you in any way, I can’t imagine a better feeling. I’m simultaneously extraordinarily comforted that I’m not alone, and blindingly enraged that almost every woman out there thinks awful things about her body, and feels like her body is the most important thing about her.

I don’t know why I feel like this is goodbye because it’s not! It’s really not. I’ll be posting a lot less often, probably, but I’m hoping that also means I’ll be posting a lot higher quality work. It’s a transition, I guess, and we tend to get navel-gazey and reflective about transitions. And Sauceome has been such a huge part of me for three years now, it’s hard to change anything about it without it feeling like an earthquake, I guess.

Niles just told me he thinks I should conclude this post by telling all of you to “Stay Sauceome.” It’s not bad advice? But I think I will end it with just one more reassurance that NOTHING IS OVER. Check back every once in a while for updates, or follow me on Twitter or Facebook, because I’ll link to new things there. I’ll still be here. :)

(Fun story: the first assignment for my first painting class in college was to pick a masterwork and copy it. I picked Girl Before a Mirror. At the critique, my professor told me that if nothing else worked out for me, I’d have a decent career as an art forger. I think it was a compliment, but to this day I’m not entirely sure.)

Trying something a little different. I will probably be posting every day this week.

I promise this is not an April Fool’s thing.

Here’s the recipe for that delicious cioppino! Niles has made two batches of this in recent weeks, and both times it was delicious. I had eaten cioppino before, but I had always assumed it was Italian, not Italian-American. Pretty cool that it was invented in San Francisco, right? Niles (who was also invented in San Francisco) was kind enough to thoughtfully help me figure out the best times for each kind of seafood, which is pretty helpful… but as always, trust your own instincts. If your fish looks opaque, if your shrimp is nicely pink, it’s good to go. Niles points out that if you get crab or mussels already out of the shell, it’s often already cooked, in which case you only want it heated through. And if your seafood is frozen, just let it cook another extra minute or two – seafood cooks fast, and it’s easy to overcook it, but if you’re paying attention you should be fine.

Anyway, cioppino is my favorite kind of recipe – one with a simple base, a general structure, and lots of delicious optional variations, open to some improvisation.

There should be a word for that kind of recipe. Should we invent one? What do you think of “Smorgasbowl”?

So Giuseppe Bazzuro, as the story goes, had a restaurant that he built in an abandoned fishing boat. When the city of San Francisco filled in the bay, he built a restaurant and a house where the boat was, both of which burned in the fire after the great earthquake. I really, really, really wanted to draw Giuseppe’s abandoned fishing boat restaurant, but I couldn’t find more than a sentence or two about him here and there, I couldn’t find any photo reference at all for him or the boat. Niles thinks I could have just drawn Mario with a “G” on his cap, but that seems like more than a little bit of a disservice to the man who by many accounts popularized cioppino.

Anyway! Stay tuned, part two of cioppino will be a recipe!

It has been a long, long, long winter in the northern Midwest, you guys. I think it’s been colder this last week than it’s been most December or January! Everyone is impatient for spring, and everyone wants to murder a certain lying groundhog. Randi and I had just finished jogging and were standing on the corner chatting. We didn’t even know this lady! But we’ve all been living in this city for the past few months, which makes us partners in misery. I’ve heard that it was 80 degrees this time last year. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around that; I kind of don’t remember it.

I certainly don’t remember all of us walking around naked, though.

Here’s a little affirmation for your Monday. :) I was thinking about this the other day. None of my personal heroes are supermodels. Not that being a supermodel isn’t challenging work, but when I think of the short list of my personal role models, they’re people who’ve done or made wonderful things, people who would be awesome at what they do no matter what they looked like.

So if it’s the things I do and the things I make that matter, why am I so hard on myself for the way I look?