Last night my husband and I attended a “friend raiser” for our daughters’ school.  One of my annual favorites, this event is centered on food as a way to build community.  Hosts team up with cooks (sometimes they are one and the same) and put together a themed dinner.  Everyone else is a guest and signs up to attend a dinner with a rank order list of themes preferred.  The event committee does a little bit of matching, assigns guests to dinners and puts that information into a sealed envelope for each guest.  All guests attend a gathering at the beginning of the evening where they socialize with the larger group, eat appetizers etc. and ultimately get their individual assignments.  Neither the guests nor the hosts/cooks know who will be attending what dinner – it is, essentially, a mystery until everyone shows up.  This year, I was delighted to work with two other mothers to put on one of the dinners.  One mother hosted at her lovely home and the other mother and I teamed as co-chefs.  Our theme was french and our dinner menu went something like this:

• Honey-Roasted Pear Salad with Thyme Verjus Dressing 
• Potato Gnocchi with Garlic Butter, Mushrooms and Snails
• Beef Bourguignon & Haricot Verts (Mastering the Art of French Cooking/Julia Child)
• Chocolate Molten Cakes with Vanilla Ice Cream
• Assorted French Cheeses

What a lovely evening it was – lots of fun preparing, cooking, hosting and enjoying each others’ company.  I have included links or references above for anyone that wants to try the items!

It was not my intent to post every day, but here I am, at 11:03 with something to say. Monday evenings, at least at the moment, are nights when dinner is simply a pipe dream for all of us.  A full day of work and an evening obligation teaching grad school result in me nowhere near the kitchen at the dinner hour, even though in our house that isn’t until at least 8:00.  This means two things:

1. There had better be leftovers for my family to eat or at a minimum something that one of my teenagers can assemble quickly (we are not a very good take out family)

2. I am usually hungry when I get home

Which brings me to my point.  I do not believe in going hungry if possible.  And, while I don’t count calories, I do not believe in wasting them on something that simply does not taste good.  And so at the risk of repeating many others’ wise counsel, my advice is to always have good ingredients on hand.  Fresh salad greens, good grape tomatoes, a bell pepper, a little bit of goat cheese, good bread, toasted, garlic salt (my secret ingredient to great salad) and some extra virgin olive oil and vinegar.  Magically, a bistro quality salad with some “crostini” on the side (if you squint and don’t look too closely at the toasted bread) appear and I will not go to bed hungry.  Suddenly I hear footsteps.  It’s never fun to eat alone.

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.  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.  I have a “day job” that I love – multiple in fact.  So, bear with me as I figure out how to blog and post and enjoy!