Here We Go

Alright.  Testing, testing, one, two, anybody there?  Probably not, but hopefully soon I will be able to share things with actual people, not just the crickets in cyber space.  But I digress.  This is a place for me to write for me, to write about what I like, and to figure out what I'm going to do next.  I love writing, and I love food, so why not combine them?  Now, don't get me wrong, somethings are not supposed to be combined, ice-cream and tuna-fish for instance (one of the first recipes around here--tuna cream).  But, something tells me I should be able to meld these two passions with ease.

There is another aspect I'd like to insert into my writing.  Local, Sustainable agriculture.  My food bible is basically Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  Now, I know that "local/sustainable" has an unfair connotation that brings a grey-haired hippie with dried seaweed and vegan chocolate chips to mind, but really, it's for everyone.  Everyone who eats that is.  We are what we are, or what we consider ourselves to be (civilized) because of the agricultural revolution some, oh, ten thousand years ago.  It is a part of us.  Yet we leave it behind in the quest for more, bigger, and better things.  But maybe, just maybe, we as a culture, heck as a species, could use a little reversion to domestication.  I'm not saying we have to go back to the 50s.  I', not saying you have to give up the precious iPhone or even the television.  You don't have to be amish to  have a garden people.  And trust me, the food that you've grown from seeds or seedlings all the way to adulthood in cooked finished products is much more gratifying than any store-bought we shove in our pie-holes because we're supposed to.  Trust me.  Been there.  

I haven't lived a full life yet, heck, I haven't even gone to college yet.  But I have just as many stories from the kitchen and garden as anyone.  Maybe more.  The kitchen is one of the only places in this world where I feel safe, creative, and at home.  Since I was old enough to drum on the backs of my mother's old Millennium-Farberware pots, I was making noise in the kitchen.  I don't know how my mother put up with me, but really that lady should have achieved sainthood by now.

So I don't have a recipe today, I just wanted to introduce myself and get the ball rolling.  It was high time around here that I started writing for people, rather than into composition notebooks which I have come to affectionately refer to as black holes.

I took my first trip to Paris last summer, and I loved it.  I adored the city and the relationship that its inhabitants have with food.  I wanted to bring a little bit of that into my own home, as food and I do not always see eye to eye.  For instance, I don't count anything as food that i don't know the name of.  For instance, maltodextrin, high Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), and many, many, many other artificial additives.  But fear not, good reader, all food from the garden if grown without pesticides, aside from a little healthy dirt, is clean.  Clean of artificial inserts that is.  And that, dear reader, is always for the best.  

So a word about my recipes.  Sometimes I make them up, sometimes I adapt them, but every time I follow a recipe, I am quite strict about following it all the way through first.  Seriously, I learned my lesson with about 5 mis-baked cookies...  But after the first go-round, I am exceptionally liberal with my recipes.  Seriously, sometimes I don't even use measures!  Wait, don't run screaming from the page!  I always put measures in my recipes, just so I have something to jar my memory.  But overall, I find that the most exciting recipes are the ones that come from experiments and mistakes.  Just saying.

So.

As Peter Pan would say; "Here we go!"