Day One: A Mission Statement...Sort Of.

 For all of the readers and those that found your way over from my previous blog, welcome! I'll be keeping my original blog as a personal diary and a way for me to keep up with things that are personal and important to me....but since cooking has become a recently discovered and oft-blogged-about passion, Im going to be blogging this little outpost from now on.

I'm hoping to keep this my corner of the 'blogosphere' (ok, can I say that I hate that term?) an honest representation of what I cook, what I eat, and the way I go about it. There will be ups. There will be downs. I can guarantee that there will be days when you get a snapshot of Thai takeout. That being said; my overall mission is to keep away from overly processed food and completely out-of-season produce. I want to cook and to push myself to learn to do it better. (baking: I’m talking about you)

I have spent this summer moving into and unpacking a house that has a fairly acceptable kitchen. I wake up at 8am on Saturdays to go to the farmers market, (and supplement that trip with a jaunt to the local chain grocery store,) I also killed a few perfectly lovely squash plants in my first attempt at a vegetable garden.

Lest you think I'm part of that semi-affluent blogger / writer / work from home movement, I'm not. Truth is I'm rather tightly budgeted. I’m twenty - five, and trust when I tell you, my already over-taxed Massachusetts paycheck gets halved a few times over for student loans before food enters the financial equation. On the other side of that, I’m also from a family of what my father affectionately refers to as 'kitchen dwellers'. When we congregate (and we're a big family, so we do congregate) we all stay in the kitchen. We eat in shifts on holidays. Quite a few of us are burgeoning foodies: we discuss recipes, grocery stores’ fliers, and will squeeze a slice of strawberry rhubarb pie in after any meal, when presented with the opportunity. So I suppose food has always been a part of the equation for me.

I’m looking forward to cooking and sharing with you.