From the cook who never could

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Ibkspecter

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4 years ago

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WELCOME TO YOU BETCHA CAN MAKE THIS FROM THE COOK WHO NEVER COULD…

If you never thought in a million years that you could cook or bake, this blog is for you. Welcome and join the club! I never believed in my wildest dreams I could be adept in the kitchen. But once I started to learn, I actually began to enjoy cooking and baking and soon the sky was the limit. I’ve designed this blog not for the culinary adept, but for all of those wannabe cooks out there who want to become more proficient but don’t know where to turn. This blog has been a work in progress for a couple of years now and reflects a few of the things that matter most to me. The primary focus of the blog is cooking and baking. I found myself becoming an accidental cook having never been interested in honing my culinary skills early on and never having anyone to mentor me. Now my hope is to help others like myself who had no one to mentor them in the art of cooking and baking and want real life information and advice on how to become more successful in the kitchen. There is a lot they don’t show you in pictures or tell you in recipes. My recipes are down home, mostly easy to prepare but always impressive. My goal is to provide recipes that actually work with detailed information on how to make them along with the lessons I learned to get them right – so you get them right first time, every time!

(Very Top: Mustard Herb Salmon atop Tangy Cucumber Salad. Top row from left: Pot Roast, Baked Eggplant Fries and Salmon Casserole. Bottom row from left: Artisan Bread, Chocolate Sour Cream Sheet Cake and Smoked Salmon Bites)

I tend to adapt recipes from a wide variety of sources. I also live in high altitude and that provides challenges not necessarily faced by most. When ingredients need to be altered for high altitude, I will note both the high altitude and sea level versions. Not all recipes are created equal and I’ve often found that with a little tweaking you can have a recipe that turns out beautifully. And isn’t that what we want as cooks? Most of us don’t have time to continually adapt a recipe to get it right and so we give up on it. My intention is to do that work for you so you never have to say this:

I also have other passions that cause me to write, namely women’s issues, my pets, family, friends and just general rants about life and the issues of the day. And last but not least I also have blogs dedicated to a very important time in my life, when I taught in after school programs at the Chicago Park District’s Hiawatha Park. You can find those blogs and all my journal entries not related to cooking and baking under the category of general rants.

I hope you enjoy reading the posts as much as I enjoy writing them. Feel free to provide your comments and insights on any of them – I would love to hear what you think! Here are some of my most popular recipe posts to get you started: