Blog Introduction: I make food

When I was in college I was the queen of eating processed food. My roommates used to tease me, "There's no food in your food!" It was kind of true. (By which I mean, *very* true.)

My favorite story from those days was one day when I was grocery shopping and buying a pretty typical assortment of the food I ate, including TV dinners, boxed mac and cheese (Western Family, of course!), Kraft singles, hot dogs, etc. As I was checking out at the register, the cashier asked me, "So, are you feeding a lot of kids?" Ha! I would have been embarrassed if it hadn't been so funny.

Somewhat paradoxically, when I was in grad school I started eating a lot healthier and cooking a lot. I discovered that I loved cooking, and trying new recipes. Even if I am just cooking for myself, I like cooking well. I try to find healthy recipes, or modify ones I find to be lighter than initially written. My cooking has come a LONG way, and though I still feel like I have a lot to learn, I am always willing to experiment and try something new or try and learn how to do a particular thing in the kitchen. (The internet was invented for cooks like me.)

I hear lots of people say that although they like to cook, they don't like cooking for just for one person, or that cooking for one person is too hard. I definitely agree that cooking for more than one is more fun; but I've decided I like cooking too much to not do it, even though it's usually just for me. (One of the tricks is not being afraid of leftovers; and sometimes halving/quartering recipes.) Actually, I figure being single is the BEST time for experimenting and trying new recipes. Sometimes I feel slightly self conscious when I'm trying some new food or method, so it's nice to not have an audience witness me bumbling around the kitchen. And it's pretty low risk to only ruin YOUR dinner if it goes badly. And you don't have anyone (like picky kids) turning up their nose at something you worked hard at. Win-win! My last roommate in Austin and I used to have "practice" dinners when we'd try new recipes and cook for each other. It was awesome. Now I feel like I'm more prepared and confident if I do ever get to have anyone to cook for.

Anyway, in the last year or so, I noticed this weird new habit starting to emerge. Often when I would cook something delicious, I would take a picture of my plate before I started eating it. I'm not really sure why I started doing this. It's possible that it's because I don't have a roommate or anyone around to appreciate my food, so I feel like a picture is a good way to feel like I'm appreciating it. And sometimes if I make something particularly good, I'll post the recipe on my blog, and I like to have a picture then.  I have a good camera on my phone that is always within arm's reach, so getting a picture is easy. Additionally, I'm going to try to put a recipe book together of favorite recipes I've found, and I like to have pictures of the time I made it. All of these reasons add up to a lot of pictures.

So I've realized recently that I have a lot of pictures of my food from the last few months....and no place to showcase them. And what's the internet for, if not to send things out into the black hole of cyberspace to pretend like there are lots of people out there caring about what you say or do? Hence this blog.

This isn't a recipe blog. I probably won't post any recipes. Just pictures. Sounds fun, right? At least for me. I love comments, so feel free to tell me how great my food looks. (If you think my food doesn't look good, then please skip the commenting! :) ) And if you're ever in the neighborhood, stop by and I'll cook you something!