An Introduction

One of my first memories as a child was dad coming home from a day on the line. He always smelled like he had cooked with lard all day, I told him, “go away daddy you’re choke”. A lot of food writers talk about “taste memories” -- flash forward a few years, Christmas Eve, mid 70s. There were plates of cheese, salami, & olives. My grandmother made caponata, and my grandfather pickled green tomatoes as well as doctoring up store-bought olives with garlic, dried red pepper and oregano. Platters were stacked with fried calamari, cold shrimp, marinated octopus and roasted peppers. There would always be clam dip, the thick kind made with cream cheese, and Fritos, the kind you can just stand and eat in front of the fridge... On this particular occasion there was a big platter of raw oysters. Now, you wouldn’t think that a 6 year old would like raw oysters but you would be wrong. As was my great uncle Jack (who just in the past few weeks passed away), who told me “oh no honey you won’t like these” just before I slurped up a few. Even though I was pretty adventurous (I liked sweetbreads at a young age), there some really weird exceptions that make me laugh when I think back. For some reason I thought Mexican food was too spicy, so the only thing I would eat would be bean tostadas. Another thing that just curdled my stomach at the time (still does) was spinach noodles. I don’t think they even sell them anymore, but the dried spinach noodles to me always smelled like the pachyderm house at the zoo. Yuck. And can you believe I though I would be a vegetarian in college -- yeah, for about a minute!

Over the last 30 years I have gone from a precocious kid to a teenager that ate the standard teenager crap, to a college student too poor for anything but crap, to a busy professional with a serious cooking hobby. This has ballooned in to notebooks full of recipe clippings and lots of cookbooks. This blog is hopefully going to be a record of what I cooked, where it came from, and whether I would cook it again or not. I'll even try to keep it seasonal (I know, very trendy)

So, welcome to my blog , and in the words of Julia Child, “Bon Appetit!”