welcome!!

Welcome to my blog!!!  I spend lots of time cooking and thinking up ways to try something new in the kitchen.  My friends and family enjoy hearing about my experiments in the kitchen and always want to see the recipes, pictures, and all that good stuff.  I love to talk about food and kitchen stuff.  I figured what better way to share my love of cooking than to start a blog and then whoever wants to check it out, can!  And then I don't have to try to remember who all wanted to get a copy of the recipe.  If they want it, they know where to look!!

A little bit more about me: I am 27, almost 28 (! where did the time go???).  I am married and my husband and I have 3 great kids.  All of them are boys, twins who will be 5 this summer and a 3 year old.  They keep us pretty busy.  We live in rural Iowa, and we have a cat named Boo.  I first got interested in cooking about 7 years ago.  My husband (then boyfriend) asked if I would try making something besides hamburger helper (not that my hamburger helper wasn't delicious, but there are only so many flavors...).  So I got a cookbook from a friend and tried a few recipes.  And I liked it!  From there it just got better.  I started experimenting with different dishes, came up with a few originals and I am always tweaking recipes that I find in magazines or online to make them just a little better suited to our tastes.  I am NOT  a person who measures! and therefore I don't really do well when it comes to baking.  It has to be too precise.  Tell me I need to throw "about a handful" of this and "a pinch" of that together and I am drooling.  Tell me I need to sift 3 cups flour and 2 tsp baking soda and I give you a "duuuuuuhhhhh, okay!!" kinda look and the cookies that look so good in the picture come out mushy and have this funny taste to them....  I make a lot of casseroles.  Soups, chilis, one-dish meals are fun too.  Since I have young kids it can be hard to make the more time consuming dishes but I do try and tackle them now and then.  The desserts that I do make are usually no-bake pies involving cream cheese and whipped cream.

My goal is to write 3-4 blogs per week over the next year.  Blog one: a recipe I have never tried before.  I want to include a picture of how the food came out, and I will talk about how easy or hard it was to make, if I had any difficulties finding ingredients or made any substitutions, if it was a cheap meal to make or if it was on the pricier side.  This will be my priority and barring some sort of catastrophe I think I can manage to make this deadline.  Blog two: a recipe that is one of my tried-and-true favorites.  Some of these will be original recipes of my own, a lot of them will be recipes I got from a cookbook or a magazine.  If I remember where the recipe came from originally I will cite that, but for a lot of my oldies I have been making them for so long I couldn't even remember where it came from if I wanted to, and for that I am sorry.  I think I have enough tried-and-true recipes to make it once a week for a year, but I might skip a week if I am busy.  Blog three: I want to talk about other cooking/kitchen stuff.  I can see myself writing a blog about my love for my pizzazz, how obsessed I am with coffee, what kinds of ready-to-eat meals I buy (you know, open the bag and throw it in the pan and heat it up, eat it), coupon clipping, grocery shopping/deals, that sort of thing.  52 of those topics might be a stretch so we'll see how it goes.  Blog four: probably won't be with any kind of regularity but I may post from time to time about what else is going on in my life besides food.  I doubt I will do that once a week but ya never know.  I do like to talk about my kids so fair warning!!! you will probably hear about them if you plan on reading this over the next year!!!!

So when is this going to start?  I decided kind of on a whim today that this sounded like a cool idea so I am not really prepared with any new recipes to try, let alone the ingredients!!  I have cooking magazines floating all over my house so I need to get cracking and see what kind of recipe I want to try first, then get the ingredients and get cooking.  March is almost over so I think I will start the first week in April with my first real blog with a recipe in it.  So be sure and check back on April 4th for my first new recipe!!