Welcome to my first food blog!

Hi Everyone! First let me apologize in advance for my poor photography skills and wordiness. I am hopeful that blogging more frequently will help me to be more concise with my writing and learn to photograph food for the web, but until then please feel free to skip past the stories and/or bad pictures to get straight to the recipes.

I would like to welcome you to my blog and tell you a little bit a about my culinary background. I grew up in Maine helping my mom in the kitchen, but most of the recipes I remember her making were not very "out of the box" or gourmet by any means, mostly because she was cooking for a small, somewhat picky child (me) and for my dad who grew up in Maine and can be described as a "steak and potatoes man". I've never asked her if she felt that her culinary skills were stifled at all by cooking for "simple" tastes, I suppose that would make for a good phone conversation sometime on the weekend....

In any event, I was the kid who was allowed to use the microwave, stove, and toaster *gasp* at a fairly young age because my parents felt confident that I was smart enough and they had taught me well enough that I wouldn't burn the place down making boxed macaroni and cheese or toast. I remember all my friends thinking this was very cool, and very unusual, because none of their parents let them do these things alone. (I fear these are also the friends who are in their twenties and probably still don't know how to cook an entire homemade meal...I'm sure you have met those poor souls at one time or another). One of my fondest memories is actually from when I was quite small, and my mom would let me play in the flour bucket. She had a big metal container from Humpty Dumpty Potato Chips, and she would line it with plastic and keep bulk flour in there for cooking and baking. When she was cooking or baking she would wash my hands, roll up my sleeves, and give me a measuring cup so I could play in the bucket and "help" her measure the flour she needed for her recipes. Way too much fun *grins*

*Back to reality* Okay! So those are some of my beginnings in the kitchen. My mom is a teacher from the deepest place in her soul, I think she must have been born this way, and so she never hesitated to take the time to let me be involved in any and every task she had, even though it meant things took her two or three times as long. I love my mom, and I owe a great deal of my success in life to her. She taught me how to think and learn with an open mind, how to feel with an open heart, and how to dream and plan for the future and accomplish anything I wanted to.

But, as usual, I digress =] Thanks for visiting my blog and I hope you enjoy!