An introduction, or a short version of my life story as a cook

For more than 10 years, I've been creating recipes, but I rarely write them down. In the past year, I've been making a concerted effort to document the tastier results of my kitchen experiments, and I thought a blog would be a better way to organize kitchen notes and photographs of dishes. As an educational tool for myself and others, I'm going to post the stories of my failures as well as my successes.

My background: I loafed around the kitchen a lot in my teen years talking to my mom as she made meals, and there were some days when she handed me an ingredient and told me to make myself useful and chop vegetables or brown meat or whatever. I didn't really have any inclination toward the domestic arts early on as I didn't see myself being able to square feminism with slaving in the kitchen.

I decided to go vegetarian as a university student. Conserving water resources and reducing reliance on grain crops to feed livestock was a more global perspective that gave me the idea to try cutting out meat, but what made it an easy choice was the fact that the quality of the meat dishes at our cafeteria was so poor. Potlucks, eat-at-home date nights and getting together for meals with friends gave me some social motivation to learn to cook.

Two boyfriends I had while I was a student were avid cooks themselves. I learned from them how to use some new ingredients and we experimented with dishes together. I learned how to mince garlic, how to make gnocchi, a few ways to ruin a pot of beans, how to make tofu taste like something. During these years, I caught the cooking bug.

Going out to restaurants of all types is another style of cooking "lecture hall" that teaches me much. I worked for a short time as a waitress in a Sicilian family restaurant, where I learned how to make a few of the sauces, and I also picked up on some techniques of preparing dinner for hundreds from a banquet hall and supper club where I waitressed. I decided I had to learn to make curries after eating at Thai and Indian restaurants in Madison, WI, (still working on that skill) and I know what the best chocolate pâté in the world (made at BIOart in Paris) tastes like in case I want to try to replicate it.

My enthusiasm for cooking and joy in exploring and keeping traditions led to forays into using historical recipes and cooking for feasts in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and I'm a regular user of cookbooks of family recipes (both my own family and other families I've never met except through their cookbooks).

I've gotten over my issues with believing that kitchen work was a way for The Man to keep a woman down. I cook now for a living. My chef is a woman. I stop short of calling myself an artist, but cooking does serve as a creative outlet for me, and I'm jolly about being paid to do what was my hobby.

I've allowed some meat and fish back into my life so I could learn how to prepare it properly. On the other hand, during the past five years, I've subtracted quite a few foods from my diet that are irritants for acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome and lactose intolerance. I do cheat every now and again, and you'll see the occasional recipe including dairy products, my favorite items to cheat with.

I dream of staying put in the same place long enough to garden and I worry over the source and production methods of my food. My husband and I are making steps every year to make our environmental impact less destructive and our food consumption more sustainable. Here is a picture of my little container garden on the balcony of our last apartment.

When I'm sitting down and writing my autobiography, I'm all serious and introspective and philosophical, but I'm not going to require that to be the tone of all the entries or the mood of all the readers. Conscious cooking is serious when you start worrying about where food comes from and why the price is the number it is, but the actions and decisions and techniques of making food tasty are fun to learn and fun to share. And sometimes I'm going to write stuff and post pictures just to show off when I'm proud of what I did.

Welcome to my virtual kitchen. There's an extra seat at the table for you.