I come from a family of folks (men and women) who get ribbons at the State Fair. People in my family pass down recipes in binders and slipped into programs at funeral services. People in my family hoard recipes like people in other families hoard... well, you get the idea. Still, I don't consider myself a foodie. I have no aspirations to take professional level classes (although, no doubt, I could certainly benefit from some), open my own restaurant (though for the record, it would be a bakery), or publish a collection of my favorite recipes in a format other than a three-ring binder for my own family members to use. Frankly, most days, I am not sure that I even like cooking. The necessity of churning out two to three meals a day for a large family (7!) for a couple of decades now has turned cooking more into a chore than a thrilling challenge for the mind and the senses.
So why a food blog?
Well, I guess because I am a writer, first and foremost. (Okay... so this actually gets me out of entering the State Fair for another year, perhaps. Oh, the horror!) I'm actually a survivor of Orson Scott Card's Writer's Boot Camp, and as such, I usually write fiction, but I picked up the writing bug somewhere in early childhood and have yet to be cured. So, food blog it is.
Also... I think I have something to contribute. Most food blogs are written by those for whom cooking is a profession or avocation. As such, most of them also are not written with the home cook in mind. Oh, they go through the motions; they give lip service to the idea that they are passing things along and adapting recipes for use in regular home kitchens. But they aren't. Let's not kid ourselves. Any recipe that has more than three ingredients that can't be found at ANY local grocery store (not just in the big cities) and uses at least one gadget that you have to special order online because it's not carried by any retailer in a 100 mile radius (or even at Amazon.com) or involves over two hours of hands-on time, was not written with the home cook in mind. These blogs are written by people and for people who are willing to spend half their day picking up fresh ingredients at eight different locations with price tags well outside the budgets of most families. And that's fine. They know their audience and are writing for it.
The home cook has to be willing to take shortcuts, use substitute kitchen gear and ingredients, or even leave ingredients out. The home cook is usually on a strict budget of both time and money. The home cook is sometimes willing to scour a local Asian market or order some obscure ingredient from an online retailer, but usually only for pantry items and usually only for things that work in their budget. (Seriously--have you ever checked out the price for XO sauce online? Good grief!) This means that the home cook frequently limits herself to recipes that are in the center section of some complicated Venn diagram of overlapping circles that say things like "cooks in less than 1 hour, preferably in 1/2 an hour", "costs less than $2 per serving, even when teenage boys are involved", "can create a shopping list for the ingredients out of my head", "works for my picky eater", and "can be made from ingredients in my pantry or at the local grocery store." If this is you, you've come to the right food blog.
If that is you, though, you are also likely in the category of bored home cooks. In 2008, my husband left the world of international banking (HSBC) to teach at a university in a small town two states over. We moved into our 9th home in 6 states (coast to coast) in 18 years of marriage. (Okay... I'll wait while you digest that.) We had been home schooling our five kids (we did that in four states, but that's a story for another time), we both did volunteer work in the community, and though we limited our kids to one (1!) after school activity, lessons, sport, etc., our schedule for our first year in our new home was hectic and chaotic. Two years later, we had transitioned all of our kids to the local public schools, and I had enough time to discover something about myself: I was bored with the limited repertoire of meals that I was preparing. The center section of my Venn diagram was very, very tiny, limiting... stifling. I got out the two dozen or so cookbooks and the stash of recipes cut out from magazines and photocopied from other family members and went to work.
And, I made a deal with my family. I would prepare 3-4 new menu items per week. (Sometimes as many as a dozen if I had time to make breads and desserts.) They got to give me a thumbs up or down on each recipe, and I promised never to make again things that were voted down. The upsides: my picky eater is trying a much wider variety of foods than he had been previously because he feels safe because of the deal that he only has to eat something truly horrid once (voting privileges are awesome!), my kids are becoming better at eating new foods (which I hope will make them well-mannered adults), and I am no longer bored. I find cooking much more intellectually stimulating and exciting than I have in years, probably since I was a young adult.
This is a blog for the home cook. It will feature new recipes with some new ingredients, some new cookware, and some new techniques. I will tell you of substitutions and compromises. I will share with you successes and failures. And hopefully, we can all find new joy in cooking.
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