If you read the stuff they pay me to write at the Riverfront Times, you’re already aware of today’s big news. One of my weekly blogs, Throwback of the House, has come to an end.

It wasn’t my idea, but I’m totally cool with it. I’ve got some other projects coming up to replace it. About a week before I got the news about the changes I realized I was starting to get a little … not so much bored with what I was writing, but craving for something new. So it all works out just fine. Since things aren’t finalized with the new stuff, I’m keeping it under wraps.

Word is I successfully saved the best worst recipe for last. Clara Jane thought so:

She took that protest upon herself when Brian asked if she wanted to try the beefy Jello.

The blog was a few weeks shy of its first anniversary. Despite eating some truly wretched stuff and suffering the guilt of a lot of food going into the trash, it was a great experience.

About a year ago, when I saw the post that Gut Check was looking for writers, I pitched several ideas. Throwback and Dive Bomber were chosen, and I never would have expected that two weekly food blog posts would have led to the quantity of writing I would get paid to do. I’m a lucky writer. If you’re not in the word business, you might not realize just how rare it is to get paid to write something that interests you on a regular basis. That just doesn’t happen to very many writers these days, as our work continues to get devalued by publishers who expect their writing talent to work for free.

Out of the two blogs, I had more of a vested interest in Throwback in the beginning. I’ve always loved mid-century stuff, but it’s been about a decade since I became obsessed with old cookbooks, thanks to James Lileks’ Gallery of Regrettable Food. Even though he hasn’t updated the gallery in nearly five years, it’s remains one of the funniest things I have ever read. And all he did was post scans from old cookbooks with pithy – I mean, gut-wrenchingly, crazy hilarious – remarks.

I kid you not – back then, before I discovered the wonders of Prozac, I would read the Gallery over and over when I felt depressive episodes arising. It’s not a cure for depression, but damn if it didn’t give me a few laughs.

The website got me interested in making my own collection of nasty old cookbooks. This was pre-Clara Jane, when I had time and money and space for a hoarder-style obsession. Not that I did anything with them, aside from looking through them, thinking up my own pithy remarks, then stashing them in my office to collect dust.

Seriously. Between old cookbooks and yarn, the back room at my old house looked like something that might require an intervention. In a fit of pre-house-selling cleaning, I gathered all the cookbooks, save for my big collection of 1950s-era Culinary Arts of America atrocities, and gave them away on Freecycle.

We’re talking boxes and boxes of books. Several hundred.

Last winter, I was browsing an antiques mall and found a boxed set of cookbooks from the late 1960s. Five books for $5. I’d been kicking around the idea of starting a Gallery-esque blog in which I actually made and sampled the recipes. I’d even gone so far as to set up an account on one of the free blogging services to do a trial run before I invested in the work of moving it to its own domain.

Then I saw the ad, and it became a moot point.

But now … I will miss it, and while the final recipe – which came from one of the books that didn’t go out with the Freecycle purge – was was of the most ridiculous, vile things I have ever witnessed, I’m going to miss, as Brian put it, the weekly adventure.

I’ll gladly revive it, but not on my own. Call me a big-headed writer, but the Throwback experience taught me some very important lessons. The biggest one being that I can come up with a hair-brained idea, put it into practice and words, and people will deem it worthy of reading and payment.

I still have that account set up from last year, but I’m not going to use it. If the good folks at, say, Slashfood, Atlantic Food, etc. are willing to pay me, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I won’t be holding my breath, though. Instead, I’ll be moving on to the next project, fairly confident in the knowledge that I will never, ever eat meat-flavored Jello again.