Who am I?  Well, I am an engineer, an entrepreneur, a teacher, a mother, a daughter, a wife and someone who loves to cook.  For me, food and cooking are the perfect mixture of art and science, bringing families together, love to the table and an opportunity for the cook to express herself.  On this blog, I hope to capture my favorite recipes, tuned to my family’s tastes and my time constraints as well as my thoughts on food, wine or whatever I am focused on learning and creating for my family to enjoy.

I have been cooking since I was in graduate school.  My grandmother is an unbelievable cook and baker and my mother is no slouch either, although she was much more reluctant to have me in her kitchen.  However, my grandfather was a dairy farmer and my Mum had a big vegetable garden so she always had fresh ingredients from which to make even the simplest dishes taste delicious.  When I  moved to England to attend business school, the take out food available to me on my budget was terrible and so I resorted to cooking.  The problem was that my fridge was smaller than the one I had in my college dorm room and my recipe repertoire was minimal so I learned two things very quickly: where the closest outdoor market was and how to follow a recipe.  In the early stages, my phone bill outpaced my food bill because I called my Mum so frequently for her recipes.  But gradually, I bought a few cookbooks and learned to experiment.  Then I got married and was surrounded by more fabulous cooks and someone that was willing to try anything that I made.  My mother-in-law’s kitchen is one of the best places on earth.  Tiny but always turning out something delicious (and of Italian derivation).

And so, I have spent the past 25 years reading cookbooks and magazines, tearing things out to try, trying them (always exactly as it is written the first time) and adjusting them as I see fit. Sometimes I adjust to my family’s tastes and sometimes just because I feel it tastes better.  I have also been looking for a way to record, organize and catalog my recipes in a more modern medium.  I currently use notebooks.  Yup, plain old three ring binders.  For those that know me, that would not come as a surprise since I love notebooks.  My recipes are certainly organized, or at least they were.  But I am finding that the binders are now so full that it might take me as much time to find a recipe as it would to make it.  And, occasionally, when I pull one of those binders out and it falls out of my hands, I am more often than not stuck with the nice unexpected little game of “pick the recipes up off of the floor and find where they went.”  Hence, this experiment with the electronic medium of recipe organization and sharing.

So that brings me to present day.  25 years later I have a wonderful kitchen that is my favorite space in the house, a family who loves to eat good food, two teenage daughters who are becoming great cooks themselves and now this blog where I can share my experiences.  I should add that for me, cooking is a passion and a hobby – something that I do not consider to be “work” but something a do for pleasure.  Indeed, I have a “day job” that I love, multiple in fact.  So, bear with me as I figure out how to use this tool, publish my recipes and blog!  Happy cooking!