I started a food blog. And I kept it going. For most of a year. At times it seemed like it took too much work and time when so many other things in my life were demanding my attention, but I kept it going and I've learned a lot along the way. I'm still trying to sort out what I want to do here. What's my focus? Do I need a focus (beyond food, that is)? Do I want a focus? I'm starting to become a bit more picky about what I post. At first, I had thought that I'd be posting a lot about Asian cooking, especially Chinese and Thai dishes. It's what I'm most familiar with, what I've been cooking the longest. Yet, this blog has made obvious to me what I was being slow to realize — that over the past few years I've expanded my day-to-day cooking beyond Asian cuisines. North African has become a new favorite (and this is spreading slowly to the rest of the Mediterranean), and with Marcella Hazan guiding my hands, I can even cook Italian.
I've even started cooking more fish. I don't know why, but cooking fish used to scare me. Like many people, I unreasonaly feared ruining the fish. Of course with any new skill, there's going to be ups and downs, but a year of watching Mike Monahan and his crew at Monahan's Seafood in Kerrytown cook up wonderful fish and seafood dishes in a matter of minutes has made me enbolded me try cooking fish at home. I will have to blog more about fish.
More recently, on the technical side, I learned that Macintosh and Windows monitor gamma settings are different. If any of the pictures seem garish or too dark, it's because they were adjusted on a Mac monitor for Mac monitors. Ack! And I thought going digital would make photography easier! Boy, was I wrong.
When it's just Joe and me, there are certain dishes I simply don't make: they take too much time, or make too much food, etc. But we have an every-other-Friday get-together with friends, and when I was laid off (long before this blog started), I started cooking for the group instead of all of us ordering in. I figured I spent about the same amount of money cooking for the group that Joe and I would have spent on our delivery food, and I got the bonus of experimenting with stews, and clay pot cooking, and other dishes that just don't work well when cooking for two. And when I wasn't working, I had the luxury of cooking all Friday afternoon, especially those dishes that required hours of stewing or baking. My friends have been, for better or worse, on the receiving end of a lot of new cooking experiences, and I like to think that most of the time they enjoyed the dishes I set before them.
It's been a good food year (Joe thinks that any year that includes chocolate chip apricot cookies is a good year), and I can't wait to find out what food discoveries lie in our future in 2005.
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