Me and a Blog

I actually never saw myself starting a blog; it definitely was not on my list of things I wanted to do. Until just recently I barely knew what and blog was and when I learned what they were, well, frankly I thought they were a “kinda silly”. So, I have now officially joined the ranks of “kinda silly”…. So let’s be silly and have fun!

I had friends who were either asking for recipes or into discussing recipes and the next thing I know I’m being encouraged to start a food blog. A food blog? “What’s that?” A few pointers in the right direction and I was hooked. Wow, there are lots of food blogs out there and reading them was addictive. My love of cooking and reading combined into one, how could I top that?

I love to cook, I cook easy to difficult recipes and the whole spectrum in between. I can be the ultimate foodie / cooking snob and then turn into the busy mom cheating by whatever means I can to get food on the table. There will be times the foodies will love me and there will be times they will scream and run because of my cheating . All I can say to this is “If you have a starving group of teenage boys so close you can LOOK UP (scary part) and see the whites of their eyes and not be very scared, you are a brave soul indeed!” I on the other hand am very scared and will do what it takes for me and my kitchen to survive, besides teenage boys are not into brie and pesto when starving….trust me! I try to be healthy and cook from scratch whenever possible but sometimes survival wins.

I think we we are losing the art of taking time to cook some “real” food and are existing on packaged food and fast food. This is not only hard on the wallet but is also just not healthy; read that ingredient list sometime. I hope I can help a few along the way learn some simple things to make life taste better and be easy on the wallet. There will be times I make more difficult things and maybe the new cooks will prefer to just watch the fun. The name of the game here is to have fun and not take ourselves or life too seriously; smiles and chuckles are wonderful things.

I will cover a wide range of subjects like quick meals, budget meals, reinventing leftovers, crock pots, favorite gadgets / appliances, more skilled and time consuming recipes and my favorite… baking. During the warmer weather I will also be covering a lot of home preserving and I think this too will also be lots of fun.

If you haven’t noticed yet, you soon will, I will chatter and type a mile a minute so grammar and punctuation are not always at the front of my brain. My goal is not to win grammatical awards but for us to learn and have fun in the kitchen so just ignore the boo boos and enjoy yourself. You can have fun in the kitchen….you really can! As well as my bad writing I am also good at cheating. Sometimes a girl’s gotta do what she can and I’m all over that. I can have a recipe and make it multiple ways, normal and cheater version. When this happens I will also put my cheat tips with the recipe. I don’t live next to a grocery store and I don’t like making constant trips to the grocery store so I keep a well stocked pantry and freezer in addition to the home preserving and half beef we buy. This has saved me many a time when I have a last minute change of plans. I have a teenage son and he can really eat, add to that several teenage friends hanging out and large quantities of food can be required on short notice. Just the other night I thought it would be just my husband and I so I got 3 pork chops out of the freezer. Imagine my face when all of the sudden I have 3 hungry teenage boys, husband and myself and I’m staring at 3 pork chops. Yea, that called for a very quick change of plans! So, hopefully we can all learn together as I make this journey through life and my kitchen.

I'm glad you're here, pull up a chair and sit a spell.

Mountain Belle