Who Am I?
I am a dad, home brewer, beer lover, home cook, DIYer, and tinkerer living in Michigan.
What Is This Blog?
When I am looking for something new to make I generally do a recipe review to see what is common between popular recipes, look for any history on a particular dish that might be relevant, and ultimately craft my own recipe based on the collected information. I’ll often make spur-of-the-moment changes while making the recipe, as often when its coming together something different seems to fit better. So this blog is part recipe source, part stream of consciousness. Some recipes I post will be tried and true, others will be more experimental with thoughts and ideas for future improvement.
Why Do I Cook?
I became interested in cooking when I was a young man with an insatiable appetite. I’d always been tasked with helping out in the kitchen, mostly the menial tasks like peeling early on (I hate peeling), and I can remember being very young helping my mum rubbing butter into flour for pastry dough. As I got older (and hungrier), I started making my more of my own food to supplement the meals I was provided. It was simple things at first; probably the thing I have made the most in my life is a fried egg and bacon sandwich. I started helping out in the kitchen more, learning the basics and seeing the fruits of my labour. The more I learned, the more I experimented, and more interesting cooking was. I even had a brief stint in my mid-teens working in a concession stand at the commercial griddle.
The exact sequence of events from there aren’t as clear in my memory, but in college my then-girlfriend/now-wife and I moved in together and I became the primary household cook. I cooked many of the dishes I grew up learning from my mum (English staples like shepherd’s pie and sausage toad), added in some Mexican-inspired dishes since we were in San Diego, and also greatly expanded what I ate. The more I cooked, the more I loved it, eventually branching out into grilling, bread baking, smoking.
These days I’ve gotten more into the science of cooking and have been steadily expanding my collection of cooking equipment and gadgets. I cook the vast majority of the food in my house and I don’t see that changing.