An explanation...

I certainly never expected to be unemployed for this long. When I quit my completely horrible job at the end of last August, I fully expected to have a job to come back to when I returned from my honeymoon at the end of September (more on that later). But, instead, it is several months later and I've not had much more than a handful of freelance jobs to occupy my time.

I have always loved to cook, and one of the (many) things I despised about my former profession was the way a 70 hour work week left no time for cooking. At best, I would cook one night a week, subsisting the rest of the time on take out or whatever could be thrown together in less than five minutes. I was too tired to cook, and my husband does not get home from his job until 8pm, most nights, so he wasn't exactly around to cook, either. I felt doughy and sad and dissatisfied with my culinary life.

So, with all of this new found time on my hands, and also with our new financial situation in mind, we stopped getting take-out. We stopped going out to eat. We stopped foraging for nuts and berries in the wilds of our pantry. And I started cooking.

Today, as I was doing some prep for tonight's dinner, I realized that life would not always be this way. I was not going to be able to cook meals that took half a day of preparation once I (hopefully) found a full time job. I wasn't going to have the luxury of time required to make fresh baked goods, or complicated French recipes, or anything more than basic recipes. Now, the basics can be delicious, and I certainly still rely on a few, but it hit me that I didn't want to forget this time in the kitchen. I didn't want to forget the things I've made, hits and misses, and the recipes that I hoped would become my own family heirlooms.

So, here I am. I do hope this will not be yet another failed attempt at blogging, I really do. I have another erstwhile online diary that I haven't updated in months and months. But, seeing as I have all of this cooking that I truly want to document, hopefully that will encourage me to be a little more reliable.

So, that's what you'll get if anyone should be reading this: a recap of recipes, reviews, rejects, failures, and delights. Should anything random from the rest of my life sneak in (oh...like my neverending job search), that will just be like the bonus features on a DVD. Thanks for reading, I'll try to be entertaining.

Mrs. C.