New Year, New Approach to Food

Cooking at home has been a tremendous part of my life, and my relationships, for years. From my first days of sharing a home and a kitchen with my husband, we have poured hours of thought and time into the preparation of delicious meals for ourselves, our families, and our friends. We love discovering a new ingredient, personalizing a recipe, resurrecting an old favorite, replicating a great restaurant dish, and sharing the bounty of our work at the dining table.

In our first years living together in a small city in the Carolina foothills, we would spend our weeknight evenings, and entire weekends, planning and preparing exciting dishes, using our lack of community in a place that did not suit us culturally as an opportunity to build upon our capacities in the kitchen. Appropriately, we got engaged over a breakfast table filled with poached eggs, wilted spinach, roasted potatoes, fresh oranges, and crispy bacon, all prepared by my husband in our (outdated by generously-sized) kitchen.

In our first years of marriage, living in Brooklyn, NYC, we allowed meal planning to guide our weekend trips all over the city as we sought out exotic spices, specialty cuts of meat, fresh-baked breads, live seafood, and a wide range of produce. We would carry everything home by train and on foot, slung over our shoulders and stuffed into backpacks and we'd let it all spill out onto the counters of our (modern but small) kitchen. Saturday evenings, while the rest of the city hit the town (or so it seemed), we would spend hours preparing our meal for two, deriving as much enjoyment from the process as from the final product.

And then, we had a baby. And then, we moved to North Carolina. And then, ultimately, I returned to the workforce. Since that time, we have had the rare occasion to immerse ourselves in an elegant home-cooked meal. Most of our time in the kitchen is largely dedicated to the same old rotation of quick and easy, predictable meals that yield multiple servings and reheat well. Not very fun to prepare (or to eat, for that matter), but a necessity in reality.

So here we are, early January 2012, and I am ready to bring a little more jazz back into our home dining experience. I am in search of new foods and dishes that can be prepared *in a cinch* and that taste great while offering some nutritional value. The reality is that I am a working parent with a husband who travels frequently, so I am looking to simplify my approach to cooking and baking, while also keeping things exciting and fresh (in both the literal and figurative senses!). I plan to use my slow cooker and my bread maker as a primary focus of this little weblog, but I may share other recipes and home-making notions that make life less complicated and enrich our bellies and our minds.

I hope you'll join me along the way!