No I'm Not a Professional

I never learned how to cook growing up, bake definitely, but cook, definitely not.  I always figured when I was rich and famous someday I'd hire someone to just do it for me :).  However, as is often the case, life has other plans and I found myself getting married very young.  I remember at my wedding shower a dear family friend gave me my first cookbook, the Betty Crocker basic red cookbook.  I opened it and looked at her with an expression of "what the heck am I supposed to do with this?".  She smiled kindly and said, "Yes dear, you really are going to have to use that.".  Sigh.

My first experience actually making a dinner came not long after.  My husband and I lived with his mom and dad for about a year after we were married.  Brent's mom is one of the most amazing women I  know.  He grew up with wholesome, homemade meals every night even though his mom put in full time hours as a principal's secretary.  They made pizza from scratch every Saturday night, including the dough.  Yeah, I know, I felt sorry for him too, marrying me.  His mom asked me to make dinner one evening because she had meetings late.  Hamburgers. Easy right?  All you have to do is add a few ingredients to ground meat, form into patties, grill and serve on a bun.  Uh-huh.  Mine ended up falling apart all over the grill (my father-in-law actually had to take his grill apart to clean it because so much of the meat ended up down where it shouldn't be).  I ended up locked in the bedroom, in tears, unwilling to come out even after my darling husband made a trip to a local burger place to buy dinner.

Fast forward a bit to our first apartment.  Our first dinner?  Burned spagettios.  Seriously.  And again, me locked in the bedroom in tears while my undyingly patient husband went and bought dinner to eat by himself.  Not even hot and sour soup would lure me out.

Fast forward again, 23 years and 4 children later.  I still have my first red Betty Crocker cookbook.  It's dog-eared and the binding is broken.  It was the first of what has become a rather substantial collection.  Brent and I have fed I don't know how many teenagers over the course of our kids growing up and more church missionaries than I can remember.  I have a small catering business and truly, one of my greatest pleasures in life is preparing food and watching people talk and laugh and enjoy themselves while eating it.  I'll say right up front I have no official education or any kind of schooling as far as food goes, aside from the one cooking class I took with Brent's sister.  But as is the case in so many things, life provided the best education.

So here's my hope with this.  Two or three times per week sharing receipes, menus, random food musings, anything and everything that might make time in the kitchen more enjoyable (notice I didn't say less stressful although hopefully that will happen too).  Like I said, I'm not a professional, but I love food and everything that goes with it.  My parents were over for dinner not too long ago.  My dad looked at me and said, "You've come a long way from burned spagettios.".  No comment could have meant more.