Some Background...

I grew up with home cooked food, cooking and baking with my parents. Cooking was a family activity, all of us taking part in peeling and chopping. It was always something fun and it is something I still share with my sisters to this day. Until I left home though, I was always assisting in someone else's cheffing and had more of an idea of the size and shape that things needed to be cut to than of the assembly, spicing and cooking generally for more than the most common of recipes.

When I moved away, therefore, there was some discovery involved: exploration, mistakes and eureka moments. One friend will very happily tell you how I once tried to replace soy sauce (which we didn't have) with vinegar. It didn't work until she added breaded fish so that it "felt like the vinegar belonged there". It has been a fun voyage of discovery ever since. According to many friends though, it has been a successful one and I have been encouraged to start a blog for a while to share these culinary explorations and experiments.

The point of this blog is to share these experiments. Some turn out better than others. Some fail utterly, others are resounding successes from the first try. Most, I must say, are generally at least moderate successes, at least to mine and my husband's taste and palette.

A disclaimer.....

I will post the recipes, successes and failures both, where the ideas came from and how they came out, with suggested tweaks. If I revisit them later, I will report on how the tweaks went. I generally view recipes as inspiration more than instructions (although I simultaneously have too many and too few cook books. Gotta love the food porn and inspiration rolled into one!). I freely substitute ingredients based on my own tastes and what I have on hand, I rarely measure, and if I do I don't do so carefully or exactly. Many of my spices are unlabelled plain or blended from spice markets all over the world, so I cook largely by sniff and taste testing.

I am including recipes more for interest or inspiration for anyone out there than as scientific logs, so reproducibility might occasionally be a bit iffy. I know some who think that I chronically under-salt things, others who think that I over spice. I cook to our taste ( and am training our baby to this taste), but don't throw babies and bath water out altogether. If something looks too spicy for you, then reduce it and add salt if that's what you need. Take some license, have some fun and adapt any and all of the recipes I post to suit your own tastes, whims, fancies and fridge.