Food

I love food. There are no two ways around it! 

 

One of the reasons I wanted to start blogging was to have a place to put down all my cooking experiments.  I like to cook, but like so many of us I get stuck in a rut and make the same things over and over again.

Well, 2013 is the year of cooking adventure because I plan on making two new recipes every month, and re-looking at 2 older recipes every month. This should (fingers crossed) mean that every week will yield a recipe.  I will try and post them on the same day each week, although it may take a few weeks to figure out which day is best.

A note : while not a vegetarian, I do not eat mammals so you will find no recipes here for beef, pork, sheep, goat, etc. I do eat poultry and fish. This is my choice, this is how I live. I have no problems with the food choices other people make, please respect mine.

When I first started losing weight, I thought I could never give up the higher calorie items I enjoyed and, to a point, I haven’t.  Low fat, low fat, low fat…well, your body needs fat, and often when fat is removed from something the manufacturer has to add something to boost the flavor. This is usually salt or sugar. I find the low-fat versions of things not as tasty, and feel they are more messed-with, if that makes sense?

However, one day you wake up to the fact that if you want more dairy goodness slathered over that baked potato, you can get nearly twice as much moisture and tang for the calories with 0% Greek-style yogurt as you can with full-fat sour cream. Don’t get me wrong, I love sour cream and there are places where the yogurt does not work for me, but more and more I find myself turning to yogurt instead of sour cream. I find that cutting half the butter or sugars in a recipe often doesn’t affect the flavor at all. (Baking can be another matter, of course.) I seek the challenge of using a more natural, less processed foods in my recipes.

So a lot of the recipes here will have yogurt instead of sour cream and mayonnaise, soft goat cheese in place of cream cheese, honey in place of sugar, etc. That doesn’t mean that the recipes can’t be made with the alternatives, and I will try to remember to mention that in the recipes.

When I was married (at 19!) this is how we ate : natural peanut butter, local honey, whole grains, yogurt, lots of fruit. Somewhere along the way I veered off that path a bit, not completely, but a bit. Here I am, though, trying to get back to where I was all those years ago as a blushing bride.  I’m not a purist, I’m just trying to find balance.

Let the cooking begin!