It has taken me into my early 30's to be comfortable with the fact that I am "vanilla". I was watching some reality show last night and someone asked a girl what she liked to do. She replied: "I once went sky diving over the Great Barrier Reef." While impressive, is that really something she likes to do? And if so, how often does one get to do the thing she likes so much, unless she lives in Austrailia.
There is so much pressure now a days to be hyper-interesting. A long ago foray into the online dating world produced such and inferiority complex. With all the other woman's interests: skydiving! Scuba diving! Mountain climbing! Rescuing blind puppies!, how did they even have time for dating? It was a mystery to me. I couldn't compete, or wouldn't.
Bottom line: I have two interest in life: Food and Reading, and when the two combine you get towering piles of Food Magazines, Cookbooks and recipe clippings combined with "to make" lists and "to go" lists. Part of this blog is to keep me honest. In accumulating a small mountain of food magazines someone (Daum) asked me if I ever make any of the recipes that I oooo and ahhh over every month. The honest answer is no. I do not. I have every intention of doing so and then life gets in the way, the magazine gets buried amongst all the others and the recipe is gone. So in order to be able to keep buying magazine after magazine (I am a prolific consumer.) I promised that I would start making at least one recipe from each magazine that I read. I'm not sure what the time frame is for that, but it's a pretty lofty goal.
I've always enjoyed cooking and would take compliments in stride, until Daum started hanging around and a few months later it came out that it was my sausage and machego risotto that hooked him. I bounce my ideas off him, I send him recipe after recipe and messages that start with; "Oh how about we do this!" or "Did you see this new restuarant?" and I can't even get started on the number of links that he must shuffle through when I get on a surfing tear. His enthusiasm; however, is what really make cooking fun for me now. It would be hard for me to not include him, no matter how resistant, in this humble blog. (and he does the hard labor. Hand rolling pasta anyone?)
Just some (bad) photos of what I've done in the past:
I'm obsessed with mushrooms. Anything that I feel I can reasonable add mushrooms to, I will.
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| Portabello mushrooms stuffed with hommade sausage stuffing. |
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| Pan roasted mushrooms with butter and thyme. |
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| Chicken and rice casserole. Yes that would be a buttered cornflake topping you see! |
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| Creamy three cheese polenta with mushroom (again) and sausage ragu. |
Then there are the random recipes. Things I see and want to try or techniques I want to learn. I'm also very concious of what I put into my body (not all the time, see above) but I do for the most part try to eat healthy and diversly. I'm also intersted in utilizing more local ingredients and learning more about what is available to me in the Boston Area.
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| Feta stuffed chicken breast over a basil and spinach salad with wild rice. |
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| Pork and scallion wontons. I wanted to learn how to fold them. |
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| Yes this is fried chicken, but after a chicken-less week, this was one of the more satisfying dishes of my week long trip to the Azores, Portugal. |
Just kidding, the student in me dies hard. Just happy to have something to share with everyone! Hopefully it will be interesting to other people besides myself!
PS. Please forgive the terrible IPhone photos.
