Edible Memoir

GRAMMAR WARNING – I am endlessly, deeply, and infatuatedly in-love with commas. Abandon all hope ye who, do-not-love-run-on-sentences, enter here.

In the beginning, there was a lovelorn kitchen and a lost young woman. Adrift in her post-collegiate years, unawares of the impending doom, Coronavirus. Smacked by reality, she did the only thing she could do, she survived… and cooked…and baked.

I felt it was my duty, at least to my household, to take up the metaphorical mantle – the Spoontula (it’s my new favorite kitchen gadget, it’s a triple threat – Spoon, Rubber Spatula, and Measuring tool all in one), when the empty restaurants created a culinary ghost town. Unbeknownst to me, the kitchen soon became my space of solace. My escape from an actual disease ridden planet.

The apocalypse almost occurred and I retreated to the kitchen, not really sure what the says about me, but that seems like a topic to explore in depth later.

I know that most people adopted the trendy, new baking-hobby to prevent complete ennui during the pandemic, but I like to think that my hobby progressed into a passion and a possible, hopeful future. Since the commencement of my cooking escapades, I have tried and will continue to try and share all my homemade meals; at least the first attempt of a dish, or the more chaotic attempt, or honestly, the attempt I actually remember, in this edible memoir. However, not all of my posts will be of my successes, what’s life without talking about the failures? We all need to get more comfortable embracing our failures. This blog will sport the mayhem (and I’m not just talking about what my kitchen looks like after I cook), that is my journey, cooking my way through recipes. Recipes vary from source, I may have picked up a cookbook from one of the many neighborhood little libraries, I might have stumbled upon a recipe wading through the seemingly infinite cooking pages on social media, and perhaps the recipe came from another blog after I googled what I could make with a specific ingredient. Most, if not all, of my edible escapades have been inspired and adapted from other ingenious chefs worldwide. Some resulted in massive successes, others were not my favorite, all those, and everything in between, will end up on this blog. Although, all of my successes will make it into my own personal, physical recipe book. It’s a tight competition, but it forces the best of the best to succeed, survival of the fittest, thanks Darwin.

One can simply cook or cook simply, and with all of the access to locally grown and sustainably created ingredients around me, I let the edible elements guide my cooking process. I view food literacy as a constant goal, one evolving and growing with more knowledge acquired. This blog is for those also striving to be literate in their edible choices.

I am an untrained cook, I do not possess a degree in the culinary arts. All of my skills are borne of experience; I have and will continue to be self-taught. Yet, I am a self-proclaimed epicure, ready and willing to use my meager abilities to create delicious, simple, and gourmet homemade meals. Born from my amateur skills, I produce a chic-rustic genre of dishes that caters to the epicure within. I attempt experimentation in flavors, employ a range of creativity in my meal conceptions, yet, I admit that my overall plating skills are lacking. Not made for art galleries or for visual art competitions, my dishes are created to be eaten; they are simply edible. I am aware of an unquestionable truth, that many, if not most, people eat with their eyes first and stomach second, which couldn’t be more true since the advent of social media food-marketing. As the age old adage goes, one’s eyes are always larger than their stomach, I can’t ever forget that the pleasure of cooking and eating employs all five senses, not just one.

Regardless, I did attempt to capture photos of my dishes throughout the cooking process and the resulting finished plate. I would be hard-pressed to admit that I actually achieved a 100% capture rate, but you’ll see what I have, the blurry, unfocused, and possibly background cluttered photos I do have. I am, after all, a hungry cook, cooking for hungry people, which thwarts my already amateur food-photographing skills. Feeding the people results in some mediocre photos; little time is wasted between cooking and consumption. Rarely, okay never, do I spend more than a minute attempting to capture the essence and beauty of a finished dish, if those aren’t excuses enough, the pictures tell their own stories; valued approximately at one-thousand words.

The professional point of this blog, of this memoir, of this collection of recipe ventures and kitchen mishaps is that it is a veritable portfolio for me and mine, a space for others to muse along with me, a collection of written work for destined, future endeavors and possible, prospective employers.

Hello, to whom it may concern, I am detail oriented, able to 
multi-task, and display productive 
communication and organizational skills.

And, I suppose I’m trying to buy-in to the idea that we all need a place to put down thoughts, to write about experiences, a virtual scrapbook, you could say, a scrapbook of your passion(s); and there is no better way to spend time, than spending time feeding your passion; especially a newfound passion. Over the course of cooking and blogging, I became cognizant of this new passion forming into my now current language of love, Cooking for Others.

As a forewarning, when reading a recipe, I skim over measurements, therefore my stories, chapters, and list of edible elements rarely have exact measurements. Measurements seem like a kind of loose recommendation. Even before I had much cooking and baking experience, I would always trust my instinct and ere on the side of my own hubris, good or bad, I could not tell you. In keeping within my brand, not only do I tend not to write down exact measurements in my own recipe or renditions of recipes, I also change recipes to my own taste, my own preferences, or based on my mood of the day, which may or may not match your tastes. With an unorthodox cooking method, each dish is beautifully and blessedly different from each other. When you have a loose map of where to go, you always find new destinations, albeit within the same area. For each recipe, each dish more or less contains the same ingredients, but every destination will be slightly different; enjoy the differences, embrace adventure. Cooking is fluid, ever-changing, and nonnumerical, I shouldn’t feel obligated to stick to rules or strict lists of edible elements. Cooking is art, there is no precise process, how else did new recipes come into being?

Cooking is one thing, baking is another. And as my best friend loves to remind me, I do not bake to her liking. She’s a maths person, she’s a rule follower, and she is a strong proponent for exact measurements in baking. I feel as if I am a baking rebel, a nonconformist you could say. I’m sure someone is rolling over in their grave and the sky will shake with a roar from the baking gods, but the world seems to still be standing, so I am just going to carry on as I have. In every recipe, and there is no hyperbole here, in every recipe, I lessen the amount of sugar significantly. My baking will seem erratic, perhaps maniacal, but trust me, the “lesser” amount of sugar, the “morer” amount of flavor. Not to give into my baser platitudinousness, but less is definitely more when it comes to baking. I don’t believe that anything I’ve baked thus far, tastes anything resembling medicine, so does it really need that extra sugar to help it go down?

As to not tary, ladies and gentlemen, enjoy the meals, the mayhem, and my memoir, and try not to become too incensed with my nonsensical ways!

As a clarification and to avoid any future nastiness, I am not affiliated with any linked or mentioned websites, brands, organizations, recipes, or products written into my chapters.