In which we meet the platers

Allow me to introduce myself.














For the purposes of this blog, this is me. 10 feet by 10 feet of vintage avocado green fake wood grain 70s glory, with a dishwasher you have to bump with your hip to start and a garbage disposal so intense it should have the horsepower noted in the lease.

This kitchen has probably twice the storage of any kitchen I had before it, and yet I am once again overflowing at the seams. Recent additions include salad spinners, springform pans, and my very own mini-blowtorch for creme brulee (if I stop posting for a suspicious period of time, someone might want to alert the fire department.) I am re-adjusting to an electric stovetop and oven for the first time since I was a kid, and accidentally setting several tea-towels afire in the interim. (You might say I am slightly accident prone.)

If one can practice divination through the "you are what you eat" approach, here's where I do my "cold reading."

I heart my avocado fridge. You could do a quick read on me from just what is stuck to it. (Namely, you could tell I am kind of a pack rat, and not terribly well organized.)
Looking at my own picture, I think the highlights are my parts of the cow, pig, and chicken magnets, courtesy of Alton Brown, the Rocky Horror magnet, and the postcard, slightly obscured, that I got from a friend in Paris which features a certain gargoyle on the Cathedral of Notre Dame which is supposed to be eating a rat, but time and the elements have worn the rat down until it looks...less like a churchmouse, and more like a trousersnake.

Clearly, I'm the sophisicate of our little blogging trio.

Actually, that disordered fridge mess isn't a bad representation; I am something of a mish-mosh, having lived in Philadelphia (briefly), Cleveland, New Orleans (where I lived longest, and what I consider my hometown), Tampa, and finally Baltimore.

The result of all this is that I like lots of food, and having found that cajun and creole food outside Louisiana is hard to come by, I was obliged to take up the torch myself, or suffer the heartache of mail order Aunt Sally's. So look to me for the occasional Louisiana recipe; I've recently set myself the task of trying all the family recipes that my classmates and I submitted to put together a cookbook in the seventh grade for our moms. Some of them look awfully good, and I'm sure everybody did the same thing I did, which involved going home and asking mom for copies of her three favorite recipes. I'm also a fiend for a good Cuban sandwhich or pork marinated in lime.

Oh, and I am a pie-maker. This will be apparent later.

Finally, I'd like to introduce a couple of my best friends in the kitchen...other than my fellow bloggers.

My favorite wooden spoon, now in need of replacement as it had an unfortunate disagreement with the blender the last time I made K.'s artichoke dip.

Note the slightly pointed corner, for scraping, just barely tasting, balancing, cutting in, de-doughing other spoons, and generally making a good thing even better.










And of course you must meet my favorite knife:
I've found that it's best to use the biggest knife you can handle for any job; it just makes it easier. Paring knives are for paring, not for anything else, really. Not when you can rock back and forth with a beauty like this one and whisper through carrots with no effort at all. Equally good for slicing tomatoes without crushing.

(Um, I have no idea what's going on with the picture on their website. A woman climbing a giant thorny rose with a knife on top of it? This...does not seem wise.)

My co-bloggers and I started this blog basically as a testament to our endless conversations about food and cooking, which flow effortlessly into all aspects of life and back again - it's all the same conversation, really. We hope to collect some of our edible insights here, and open the conversation to any who are interested.