My Life with Food: An Introduction

I finally decided that I would try my hand at food blogging (I want to call it flogging, but that might be insensitive to Paul Bettany in The DaVinci Code--not that I readily associate myself with anything Dan Brown related, but I can't resist Mr. Bettany's unrepentant awesomeness).  I've always loved food, but until about a year ago, I didn't have a lot of experience when it came to cooking.

I was raised in a household where frozen meals and Hamburger Helper were a way a life.  I remember I had a Mother's Day assignment where I had to write a paper about the my favorite meal my mother makes.  I picked Stouffer's mac and cheese (what, it's delicious!).  My teacher thought I was being snarky and asked me to redo the assignment, not believing that a child could be raised on oven-ready food alone.

When I eventually got to college, I stuck on the meal plan for as long as I could.  Most people hated it, since they were used to home-cooked meals drenched in love and more than 15 minutes of work.  I, on the other hand, loved it.  It was heads and shoulders above what I was used to, and, honestly?  I doubted I'd ever be able to make anything closer to edible.

Luckily, I had the pleasure of having two wonderful apartment-mates my senior year who openly embraced cooking--real cooking--as a way of feeding yourself.  They laughed at my many packages of ramen and encouraged me to just go for it:  get a recipe and make it!  It might not taste the best, but it's pretty hard to make food really inedible.  And even if I do massively screw up, there's always ramen, right?

This all comes down to my type of cooking, which I describe as splash-and-dash:  learning to cook well under a time crunch with a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Most importantly it's fun, loose, inexperienced, and especially enthusiastic.  It's about figuring out that cooking is not actually that hard if you keep practicing.  So this is me, practicing.  This stuff isn't gourmet; the photos are from a cheap Costco camera.  But I'd like to think it's a way to see how a young twenty-something can teach herself to cook confidently and eat well.