Greetings and Salutations

The purpose of this blog is to track my food adventures. I love to cook, but go through phases where I don't make anything and all the delicious ingredients spoil and the Darling Devoted Husband and I end up subsisting on fast food and frozen egg rolls from Sam's Club. Which, ok, sometimes these are good, but they are really not anywhere near as delicious as the foods I can make myself when I put the work into it. Hopefully recording these efforts will help keep me on track with cooking--and the DDH and I will be the better for it!

While I love to delve into fancy foods, and having a garden means I do experiment with a lot of from-scratch preparations, reality is that the DDH and I work full time, he's in law school on top of it, and there are always a million other things to do. I don't have the time or energy to do everything from scratch or fancy all the time.

Money is another issue (did I mention the DDH is in law school?). Now that we've spent all the money starting the garden, I have a plethora of free tomatoes, zucchini, and jalepeno peppers, but beyond that I've got to get creative with the budget. I go to the farmer's market every week and troll for fresh produce, since this is an area where I really notice quality differences. As a bonus, I get to learn how to cook all manner of strange creatures, like callaloo, and try out things like fresh figs:
But as a rule, I do not have the money to buy local meat, so I tend to get it in bulk at Sam's Club or on sale at Reasor's (a Tulsa-area grocery chain). I don't notice a huge taste difference in meat, so I don't mind, and while I would be willing to eat smaller meat portions to get better quality meat, the DDH is a die-hard carnivore and wouldn't. At all.

That's pretty much the bare-bones basics of my food buying and cooking philosophy for now. Read along and we'll see how it goes. ^_^