The $64 Tomato and My Adventures in Food Blogging

How one man lost his sanity, spent a fortune, and endured an existential crisis during his adventures in food blogging, starting a blog from scratch, and the unpredictable reality of the blogging journey.

I kinda stole that line from the original author, and modified it to fit my experience here with blogging. If you don’t know the book The $64 Tomato, it tells a tale that I’m sure a lot of people can identify with. While in the pursuit of something that seems like a simple proposition, such as growing your own tomatoes, the roadblocks and obstacles that we don’t anticipate complicate the project to where things can quickly get out of hand. In the author’s case, he hilariously winds up calculating that for all his efforts he still spent $64 per tomato at the end of the day.

Anyone that has tried to start their own business or launch a new blog might find themselves in an identical situation. My experience with food blogging has been no different. I didn’t even set out to get into food blogging specifically, but through an elaborate maze of twists and turns, I’m here. I’m probably about $30k spend into the adventure and still bleeding out, with nothing else important to do than share my blogging story in the hopes that it has some entertainment value. If I’ve kept you this far, the background story alone will make the reading worth your while.

My Background Before Blogging

Before COVID hit in 2020 and the world changed, I was living on the East Coast playing some mediocre small stakes poker that paid well enough for me to quit struggling to find traditional employment. I was making a living in the smoky corners of East Coast poker rooms—grinding out small-stakes tournaments, surviving on quick wit and sharper instincts. I wasn’t winning bracelets or making headlines, but after years of struggling to find work I was at least where I could be to keep myself afloat. The road to blogging hadn’t even crossed my mind—I didn’t know what a food blog was or that blogging could be a career.

My career as a poker player began with the leftovers of disability checks, excess refunds from student loans, and the quiet belief of a girlfriend who would later become my wife. The turning point came when she handed me $500—a few weeks later after winning everything I played in and a $5k slot jackpot too, I was sitting on over $50,000 in cash neatly tucked away in a casino lock box. I didn’t have a thought in my mind about a food blog then, I probably didn’t even know what one was. Doing well at the casino led to me getting on the path towards eventually becoming a food blogger.

It took me a couple of years to get there though. I was enjoying my youth before I got too big and sore to move like I once did. Like the photo above, I was already packing on pounds before I got good enough to get lazy – and it was only going to get worse.

But poker, for all its excitement, is no friend to a healthy lifestyle. The nightly tournaments I loved rarely ended before dawn, and the long drives left me stiff, sore, and perpetually hungry. With my new “success,” I indulged: room comps, VIP buffets, and extra paid hotel nights. I lived out of a suitcase, and my wife and I ate like royalty—until our bodies started to show it. I gained over a hundred pounds during those years, fueling myself with the late-night excess that came so easily.

Then, suddenly, everything stopped. COVID hit. The poker rooms went dark. That same year, my brother died from a fentanyl overdose, and my family back in the St. Louis area fell into crisis. My grandmother—90 at the time and still the backbone of our family—needed help. My father was drinking himself into oblivion, destroying her house. My uncle, disabled with a severe head injury, would only listen to her when he felt like it and his own house was in severe disrepair.

With little more than a suitcase and good intentions, my wife and I packed up and moved to Missouri. Gone was the income, the casino life, the steady monotonous drone of clinking poker chips. I had no plan except to get healthier and figure out a way to build something new from home—a life that could support my family and maybe, just maybe, give me a sense of purpose again. I never would have guessed that starting a food blog would be my path forward.

How I Discovered Plant-Based Eating and Vegan Recipes

I was incarcerated in the Florida Department of Corrections in 1997 or 1998, working in their prison industry doing GIS/CAD projects when I first learned what a vegan was. The food in prison started out okay when I first went in a few years before. Tough-on-crime politicians kinda pitched a softball to privatization companies that our food was too good for criminals. What came next should be referred to the International Criminal Court for prosecution. Companies were happy to provide food service options that were next to inedible and caused everyone that ate them frequent gastric distress.

We happened to have a few guys from one particular religious denomination whose local leader enjoyed a fair amount of political influence, and was able to use it to get a vegan meal plan started for their people. They made them recruit enough extra people to participate, and I signed up because the food couldn’t get any worse so I was game for anything at that point.

I stayed on the “vegan diet” there for almost three years (I know the “veganism isn’t a diet” folks can be mad but that’s what they called it and I often use the term out of habit). I wound up in the best shape of my life and I felt great. I used to run three miles a day for exercise, until I got transferred somewhere else with no vegan diet program and got too fat again. I’d always been fat, or struggling with weight, but the years that I was a vegan showed me what health benefits I could reap. That knowledge would become part of my food blogging journey later on.

How I Got Back Into Vegan Food and Discovered Blogging

When we moved to Missouri, my wife and I hadn’t even lived together before. We were eating trash and our habits were just so awful. We discussed the proposition and were supposed to transition cleanly into a vegan diet and everything would be easy peasy lemon squeezy. It was not easy, peasy, or lemon squeezy at all. In fact, things would get worse before they got better.

We also had my wife’s mom with us, and she wasn’t about to entertain the idea of a healthy diet. Not even a little bit. My family was too needy to notice that I wanted to at least try to eat better. My mom asked my wife for Xmas preferences, then sent us hundreds of dollars worth of food gift baskets that weren’t vegan. Hell doesn’t know the heat of Midwestern folks that don’t want their loved ones eating grass and sticks like the libtards. Add a schedule with constant family emergencies, and not many options for healthy convenience foods, and I eventually found myself in the ER over 500 pounds and too fat for their scale.

Facing Health Challenges and Finding My Why for Blogging

In December 2021, I was diagnosed with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and discharged after they didn’t find anything more than some severe inflammation from eating greasy holiday foods. I tried doubling down about getting everyone on the vegan meal plan with me, and decided that I should work on the recipes that I knew to make good foods to get everyone on board. I first intended to write some recipes in a book format. I worked in the industrial prison kitchens and knew some tricks of the trade, and had some food science background from Food Network shows.

My first contribution was adding xanthan gum to vegan cookies, like in this Good Eats Copycat Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe that I developed. I found that vegan cookies were often lacking, they’re the most vulnerable to not standing up to scrutiny when the vegan baking swaps don’t go right. The texture gets dried out and crumbly so quick, that’s if they don’t go flat when you bake them instead. I took the best recipe and then worked with it until I could get a vegan cookie to come out identically to a regular cookie. I had a whole book planned, but had to come up with a way to sell it.

Why I Started a Blog Instead of Just Selling a Book

My first website adventure wasn’t even in the realm of blogging. I wanted an ecommerce site to sell the book from, but I eventually found out that most likely nobody would ever hear about it or buy it. Who was I to just have a book and expect people would buy it? The second evolution of my website idea attempted to handle that problem. People read blogs and if I do some writing about the recipes, then maybe people would get interested in buying my book of recipes. Sounded easy enough to get someone lined up to build the site once I found out I couldn’t wrap my mind around the editor.

Last update on 2025-10-19 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

Plus, I figured if I had a website and I got people to look at it then they might just buy a product I recommend to where I would make a little something too. Like this book I’m talking about, it’s a really hillarious story and worth reading for the connection we all share in the face of life’s absurdities.

Building My First Website (And Learning Expensive Lessons)

Getting back to the theme here that I started with, I paid my first $1500 for some help building a Wix website. The guy that sold me on his services promised all kinds of functionality for the price, and that it was exactly what I needed for my business endeavors. Two months into the project, I find that the agency owner was just some loudmouth frat boy that had a stable of “developers” that couldn’t do what I needed or expected with a Wix website, and who was also unwilling to refund my money because he’s got to pay his developers anyways.

I didn’t even expect very much, and they weren’t able to deliver that. I don’t think I knew anything about a food blog except there was a dynamic front page where the recipe posts were shown and a recipe index that you could search old posts. They didn’t even get that far, and I spent more time arguing about the color scheme because “it’s GOT to be green because you want to have a vegan blog, that’s how business works” the guy said. He also did business logo design services with whatever the free tool suggestions were for what that’s worth.

I had to use the bank to charge back for that one too. He tried to fight the chargeback by promising to deliver if given the chance. What I needed was physically impossible unless he had developers hand build every WordPress plugin I needed, because Wix had none of the food blog functionality that was promised. Faced with that reality, he gave up the fight and I got my money back over six months later.

Discovering WordPress, Food Photography, and Real Blogging

In the meantime, I learned about WordPress and got on my photography game. I had some time to prepare and read up on what was needed. I thought I was ready, but things kept getting more and more complicated and costly. Make sure you follow along to get the next installment of this blogging journey—it just gets more ridiculous and painfully expensive from here.

Some of my food blog recipes that you might enjoy if you eat plant-based:

• The Best Shaved Tofu Gyros with Creamy Vegan Tzatziki
• Low Sodium Stir Fry Sauce
• Impossible Breakfast Sausage Copycat
• The Best Vegan Philly Cheesesteak
• Sodium Citrate Cheese Sauce Recipe