All Good Things

Ellen C. Wells

Do you watch the cooking competition shows? I do. I love them, mostly. The “Great British Baking Show” is my fave—they are so darn polite and are all such chums. “Chopped”? Not very chummy, those chefs, but I love the show and the pace and the crazy chile-paste-and-fish-sauce-required-for-dessert ingredients.

And then there are the kids’ competitions. What I appreciate most about the children on these shows isn’t necessarily their skill level (although a 6-year-old making a souffle? Props to her), but their outright honesty. It was the honesty and vulnerability of one of these kids that presented me with my favorite word ever to be spoken. Scare-cited. The lad was scared to be cooking in the competition, and yet he was excited to be participating in what was to come.

Scared and excited. Scare-cited. This kid perfectly named that mix of feelings we all experience at pivotal moments in our lives, like graduation, having children or preparing a Beef Wellington for Chef Gordon Ramsay.

This is a scare-cited moment for me. No, I’m not pregnant and I certainly have enough degrees so I'm not going back to school. And while a Salmon Wellington is something I’d love to tackle someday, I'm not preparing for a reality TV experience. What I am doing, though, is moving on from Green Profit. Mostly. I’ll be leaving this role as Editor-at-Large for the magazine, leaving this editorial column and leaving the article writing to others (mostly). I’ve been at Ball Publishing since 2008. I’ve enjoyed the work, the topics, the people I’ve met and the issues I’ve covered. It’s been great. You’ve been great! It’s time to do something new, something exciting. Something scary, even.

The scary part? I’m not 100% sure what that “something new” is. Not even 50% sure. I’m fortunate that I'm in a position where I can take some time to explore the possibilities and figure out the Act II, Scene II of my career. Yes, it’ll probably including writing and storytelling and helping others the best I can. Dream jobs? Taking over CBS’s “On the Road” segment from Steve Hartman or—even better—replacing Sam Sifton as head of the Cooking department at The New York Times. A girl can dream, can’t she? (If you have a connection at CBS or NYT, call me).

I could consider it a combined result of the pandemic and middle age, this “What else?” wondering of mine. The global impact that can be wrought by just a small fragment of non-living RNA got me thinking about what if tomorrow never came. And, seriously, I don’t have as many tomorrows left as I used to have. I’m opening myself to the possibilities those tomorrows hold for me.

I’m not going away forever, though. I’ll have the occasional assignment within these pages. And did you think I’d hand off the buZZ! and Tropical Topics e-newsletters so easily? If you subscribe to both, you’ll still see me drop into your inbox six times a month.

Last words of advice? Keep doing what you love and loving what you do. GP