On Little Successes

Communal feedback from last year echoed one thing over and over: MORE behind the scenes, please!

In an effort to satisfy that demand, this week's drop is a behind-the-scenes peek at a recent success + what goes into a sixty-second video + Cheryl Day's biscuit recipe and a few tips from our biscuit class.

I'll be back next week (hopefully as edits are still coming along) with a LONG and exhaustive drop on Iraq, complete with original writing and video.

Take care,

Anela

A few weeks ago I had my first little success on this new path I've turned my business towards in 2022: I went on my first paid creator trip! And while this trip had a very modest budget it was a big milestone for me and my new direction.

I've found in my desire to pursue work that focuses on history, race, culture, and politics, travel organizations are likely my best bet for paid partnerships. They've generally been much more receptive to the kind of focus I'd like to bring to my work. YAY!

And yes, I hope that partnerships won't be necessary one day and my work would be entirely community-funded. But until that day, visitor's organizations and travel companies seem to be a good fit.
 

So I'll take the little wins, like a paid trip to Oklahoma City to explore Black-owned businesses, Indigenous histories, and more. It was very cool to see another place that in my DC-focused "big city" mentality I may have previously ignored but turned out to be really cool.

This community is ad-free, so if you want to see the curated content created from that trip you'll have to check it out on social. However, I am sharing one piece of what I filmed in OKC here with you all, an interview with Chef Andrew Black of Grey Sweater. This is unedited, as you'll be able to tell from the sound quality, with captions added. I eventually used just a snippet of this interview in my social content, to add some depth and personality to my sharing about Grey Sweater.

I'm sharing it here as I think it gives a good example of how much work goes into a 60-second video. This interview ended up making up just 5 seconds of the final video, edited together with other footage taken over the course of a night, a voiceover written and edited and recorded by me to pull it all together, and then eventually paired with a caption to provide context.
 

Also sharing as I think there's an interesting conversation to be had about Black folks and fine dining in the United States... which might be the focus of a future drop. We'll see!

Video Description: Anela talks with Andrew Black, the chef and partner at Grey Sweater, a fine dining tasting menu-only concept in Oklahoma City. He's also a James Beard Semifinalist.

Thank you to everyone who attended the class with Cheryl Day! It was so fun and so great to see so many of you making biscuits for the first time. You can follow Cheryl on Instagram and I highly recommend buying her incredible book on Southern baking. Sidenote, I'm considering trying to bake my way through it but it will likely take me multiple years... Still worth it though right?

Check out Chery's incredibly Flaky Buttermilk Biscuit Recipe and a few tips from the class below on how to get perfectly flaky biscuit layers!
 

1. Make sure your ingredients don't get too warm! Work with cold butter, cold buttermilk, and it's totally ok to pause and pop your dough into the fridge if it gets warm or you see the butter starts to melt under your hands.

2. To build those flaky layers there are many methods/ways. You can fold the dough over onto itself like an envelope when rolling out, cut and stack the various pieces and roll them out again, and also use your hand to smear the butter into the dough (also called "fraisage") when you're working it.

3. If it's going to stop you from making a biscuit, don't sweat it. Adjusting your baking based on what you have/in the moment is just fine! Most likely you'll still end up with something delicious even if it's not "perfect."

Last week I delivered fully edited photos and promotional videos to a local Black-owned food business, a project I took on at no cost to help them develop their own catalog of marketing materials. This is something I was able to take on because of your membership in MATM, so thank you!

Are you on Close Friends? If not, you're missing out on stories I'm not sharing anywhere else like scenes from my trip to Iraq. Shoot me an email with your Instagram handle so I can add you to Close Friends list there.
 

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