Hi. I’m Ashton. And I’m really glad you’re here.

A little about me… I was born and raised in North Carolina. After spending some time in Utah and then in Virginia, my husband and I decided to come back to my hometown in NC to raise our three children. We live within 10 minutes of my parents and 3/5 of my siblings. The whole family gets together for food, games, and cousin time as often as we can!

In 2010, after my first child was born, I started my first blog: Something Swanky. In doing so, I spent more than a decade pioneering the industry that is now known as content creation. Food photography and recipe development became my passion. It was a creative outlet I had never dreamed of! Not to mention how much I loved the friends I made in the blogging community and the personal growth I experienced as an entrepreneur. I loved it so much that I decided to start a second food blog– and roped my younger brother into doing it with me! Which is how Keat’s Eats was born.

But as the online publishing industry and media platforms evolved, and content creators morphed into “influencers,” the dream stopped feeling so dreamy. Something Swanky stopped feeling like a passion-project-turned-dream-job and started feeling more like a 9-to-5 grind. I started to resent the time I spent working on it, because it took SO MUCH of my focus and energy away from my family. When it was a thing that brought me joy, that was kind of ok. Because back then, it made me a happy person; and I loved that my kids saw me working hard doing something I was passionate about! But when the joy was gone, it no longer felt like the right way to prioritize my time. Not when my children were growing so quickly and needed so much more of my attention.

SO I SOLD MY BLOG.

And I took a year off to figure out what I wanted to do. We could get by as a single-income family (which had not been the case for most of my blogging career), and that meant I could do something besides blogging if I wanted to. I tried a few different things, found some new hobbies, went into a crafting frenzy for a little while, and ultimately decided to… come back to blogging!

But this time… I wanted to do things differently.

 Up until then, we had both been pretty casual about Keat’s Eats. It had a good foundation, and we had always intended for it to become a high-traffic, income-yielding site one day. But while I was blogging full-time on another site, I just couldn’t invest the time we needed to bring it up to speed. 

Around the same time I made my decision to pick up blogging full time again, Keaton made the decision to step back. He’s up to his eyeballs in his full-time job, parenting, coaching, and thousand other entrepreneurial pursuits. It’s felt right like the right time for me to take over the blogging gig solo with some support from him behind the scenes from time to time.

So what am I doing differently this time around? 

For starters… I’m not going to be an influencer. Of course, I’ll post on Instagram and Facebook. And you couldn’t keep me away from Pinterest if my life depended on it! But you won’t see anything sponsored on our social media accounts. And I won’t be working the algorithms, trying to work myself into your feed as often as possible. Instead, those platforms will be a user-friendly place for our readers to find our content when and if they want it.

Will I include sponsored posts on the blog? Maybe. But not anytime soon. And never any sponsored content that doesn’t feel authentic and organic to Keat’s Eats. If it’s not fun for me to create, I won’t be publishing it. Period.

I’m also not worried about perfection. Will my recipes work the same for you as they do for me? Maybe not. I certainly can’t make any guarantees as to recipe results when there are so many variables involved. But I can guarantee that the recipes shared on Keat’s Eats are recipes that we really made for our own families and loved. 

My focus is to bring to life our family cookbook for all of our readers. We have so many recipes that have been apart of our lives for decades, and I can’t wait to preserve them in a digital format here on Keat’s Eats where everybody can enjoy them!

Thanks for taking a minute to stop by and read our story. We’re glad you’re here, and we hope that you’ll stick around and get to know us even better through the recipes that we share on Keat’s Eats.

 

If you’d like to contact us, reach out via email: keatseatsblog@gmail.com

Featured On: