How Did I End Up Here?

Welcome everyone to my first blog post! I have always had a fascination with food and especially cooking. I have a collection of cookbooks and magazines and I am a faithful viewer of ‘The Food Network’. In fact, I would be probably be quite happy if it was the only channel I had. My son on the other hand would probably have a fit without Playhouse Disney. Recently, I had discovered the absolutely thrilling world of food blogging. As I dove into this world I soon discovered a vast community of home cooks with little formal training other than a love for good food and the satisfaction of preparing it. Everyone has their own reasons but what I took away from it was an inspiration to do it myself. So I kept telling myself I should start a blog. But that wasn’t enough… yet

Anyway despite this interest in the culinary arts, I am a less than stellar cook. The basics often elude me (such as cooking chicken and blanching vegetables) and I feel proud whenever I throw more than two things together in a pan and call it dinner. Prepared meals are a frequent staple in our kitchen. It was on a recent grocery trip that another incident started pushing me to do this blog. We passed by some hummus and my wife asked me to grab it. That day I had read a recipe for hummus on a food blog, Closet Cooking, and thought to myself “why buy hummus for $5 when I can make it for $10”. So defying all economics based logic I grabbed the ingredients to make my own (I have a decent memory for things, in a list of 10 items I will remember all but the most crucial). I’ll actually post more on this event in a later post but let’s just say it turned out very well, and nobody was unhappy about my choice to make hummus.

It was a small recipe but it definitely made me feel a sense of accomplishment. But I still wasn’t blog ready. I mean a bad cook writing about his mediocre attempts at cooking just wasn’t enough for me… I needed a gimmick. And that gimmick came in the form of Carol’s French Laundry at Home. I loved the concept of cooking every recipe in a book and while ‘The French Laundry Cookbook’ was well above my capability, Teena’s The Gourmet Project tackling the mammoth ‘The Gourmet Cookbook’ brought me down to a more realistic level. But that wasn’t the book for me either. I have several of the ‘Best’ series of cookbooks from The Editors of Cook’s Illustrated and I love them. The recipes are great but it is the instruction and explanation of every dish that I enjoy. It lets me understand why a recipe is prepared a specific way and how the ingredients come together. It brings out the scientist in me and brings back memories of university chemistry labs. So there it was, the book (or series of books) that I was going to use to get started. In particular I was going to focus on ‘The New Best Recipe’ book. The ‘Best’ recipes cooked by the worst cook. Well maybe not the worst, just a mediocre cook.

And I guess that is how I ended up here… I love food, I want to be a better cook, and since everyone eats to live (except for the true food aficionados living to eat!), it’s not like I wasn’t ‘cooking’ before. At least now hopefully it will be better and more exciting, and my family will enjoy it.

So I hope that this continues for awhile. Thanks for stopping in and I hope to see you back.