Where I’ve been and where I’m going.

Reading, writing and thinking about food―and cooking food!—are such a significant part of my life now that it’s hard to believe I’ve only been sharing recipes and food thoughts here at MetaCookbook for eight months. The importance of food and food issues have been a long and slowly simmering topic for me (kind of like an excellent pot of chili), and one of the sources of this interest was “the 2001 Discover article on Gary Nabhan and his quest to eat locally sourced foods to save the planet.”:http://discovermagazine.com/2001/may/feateatlocal

Nabhan’s views, as presented in the article, started the process of challenging how I thought about food and how I eat. I will come right out and say that reading the article didn’t change my food habits right away―but Nabhan’s ideas and experience lodged themselves in my brain.… Continue reading →

No cookbook or recipe today.

I’ve been fighting with an entry all day today. It’s not a recipe entry, and it’s not another one about a cookbook. It’s about food, and a few of the changes in my relationship with food. It’s basically a “thoughts” post.

The problem is that I ramble in that post. A lot. I tend to be a bit of a rambling writer anyway, as I suspect my readers know by now, but this is even larger in scope, so the rambles are all over the place. It’s all connected in my head, but it certainly doesn’t show up connected in the words. So I keep drafting and tweaking and asking for help. Angelique has helped me polish much of my writing in my life, including my M.SContinue reading →

A comment on numbers.

Occasionally one of us will mention how many recipes we have left to make or how many recipes we’ve made to date. Oddly, both numbers are a bit more fluid than you might expect.

Mostly, that second category is pretty solid. The main thing that keeps it from being a set number, so far, is the two How to Cook Everything books we own. There are several recipes that are duplicated across the books, and we don’t always know we’re making one that’s in both books (such as “Everyday Pancakes”:http://www.metacookbook.com/archives/87-Well,-was-it-a-new-recipe-or-not.html) Due to that, I “made a decision.”:http://www.metacookbook.com/archives/90-46-Pasta-Carbonara.html As we find recipes that are in both books, we make a note of it. If we’ve already made the recipe once before, our count completed increments by one.… Continue reading →

We’re back! Just in time for the year’s end.

Hello, all! Just a quick note here before I (hopefully) start bombarding your RSS readers with posts.

As you can see, there’s a pile of recipes in the queue. I apologize for not getting more of them up sooner, but I’m on to tackling them now. Upon our return from New Mexico, I fell ill basically until the holidays hit. So the holidays were spent being happy and merry, respectively, and yesterday was spent getting the house back in order after traveling, being ill, and being happy and merry.

We have barely cooked upon our return. We cooked a boneless rib roast and mashed potatoes for Christmas dinner, and Bill stepped into the kitchen yesterday to turn the leftovers into a tasty meal. I am incredibly lucky to have such a good cook living with me.… Continue reading →

Update

Hello, all.

I want to apologize for the lack of posts since Wednesday. A confluence of two unavoidable events caused it. Well, one unavoidable event and one instance of me being spacey.

The unavoidable event was flying to New Mexico yesterday, and all the chaos that entails. We have many wonderful loved ones here, all of whom need some of our time. Especially as we’re here effectively to celebrate the holidays, there’s a lot going on. Such as a party this afternoon at Bill’s mother’s house. So yesterday was not a great day for posting.

The other event happened Wednesday night.

We had decided we wanted to try two recipes a second time, the “Steak, Mushroom, and Ale Pie”:http://metacookbook.com/archives/140-71-Steak,-Mushroom-and-Ale-Pie.html and the “Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Garlic.”:http://metacookbook.com/archives/146-75-Roasted-Brussels-Sprouts-with-Garlic.html… Continue reading →