Let's Get Back To The Kitchen

So well yeah, I have a few blogs to vent my crazy but I have refrained from blogging about my true obsession until now.  I love to cook and I am freakishly in love with food. While I usually quietly toil away in my kitchen for my own enjoyment I've decided to start posting some of my creations here to share with friends.  

Please keep in mind I am not a professional chef nor do I play one on

One of my favorite things is to take a concept from a recipe and make it my own by experimentation. When I was younger, I doctored tried and true recipes from Fannie Farmer, Good Housekeeping, Joy of Cooking, The New York Times Cookbook and any other cookbook I could get my hands on  much to my father's dismay.  The early experiments weren't always pretty to look at but they were usually tasty!  

Then one day my grandmother turned on our local PBS station and a strange lady wielding a knife and talking about chickens changed my life.  

Julia Child's The French Chef reruns became my favorite TV show ever.

Julia is attributed to saying "Learn how to cook -- try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless and above all have fun."

I fiercely live by this rule in the kitchen! If you are afraid of change, experimentation, or sometimes unorthodox preparation methods this is not the blog for you!  I am by no means the most creative person in the kitchen and I do not believe you need to follow proper presentation techniques when you are feeding those people who randomly live with you.  (They know who they are!)  

So if you are here to discover proper technique or etiquette for anything, well let's just say you're not in Kansas anymore maybe you should click your heels now!

Anyway, from Julia I learned that if I ask people how they made something they might actually tell me or better yet show me. From watching I discovered a really cool secret to cooking, it is really just science & math that tastes good. Thus came the first real teacher of hands-on, in the kitchen, cooking techniques and shortcuts, everyone's mom and grandma. And no one was safe from neither my inquisitive mind nor my random takeovers in others women's kitchens.  

This is when I also began my strange hobby of collecting church cookbooks. When I see something I want but people don't want to share the knowledge (families’ secret recipes and all). My quest then begins to find out if your aunt put the same recipe in the church bazar cookbook for prosperity.  

Once I get a basic idea, I like to use science and math to to tweak, improve, and sometimes completely fail at 

EXPERIMENTATION

I have upgraded over the years from my trusty cookbooks and I now collect recipes from 

So come along with me as I explore the greatest cookbook ever

and post the good the bad and the ugly from what I find there!