Published!

It's a minor thing, but it made me feel good. The recipe for Chayote and Sausage Stew that I posted here I also put on AllRecipes.com. I was hoping to get a nutritional analysis since they do that for all their recipes, but apparently they only do the analysis for recipes that are published for public use.

Well, I got the notice today that they tested out my recipe and chose to publish it. So, if you're at all interested in seeing the nitty gritty on fat, fiber, and other things, check it out here. Details are listed in the far right column about halfway down the page.

There are several things I like about the AllRecipes site. Once you set up a profile, you can save recipes to your "recipe box," which can then be sorted however you desire. You can also rate and comment on recipes after you've tried them. The comments I read from other people who've tried a recipe are often invaluable. When you see 8 people who say the recipe was too sweet or salty, I know before I even try the recipe that I should alter the sugar or salt. Another piece I like is the shopping lists. You can select the recipes you want to shop for and it will automatically compile it all onto a list. Then you can edit your list to include items not in the recipes, like garbage bags. It's still a clunky feature, so I don't use it very often but it's pretty cool.

From the Kitchen

So, this may surprise more than a few people, but dudes, I can cook. More than that, I like to experiment. Sometimes I fail and sometimes I surprise myself. So, from time to time I'll be dropping some recipes on these pages.

Back in high school, my friends all knew that I majorly sucked at anything even slightly resembling the domestic arts, and cooking was probably tops on that list. My mother has a picture of my first attempt at cooking oatmeal. Apparently I thought that in addition to rehydrating the oatmeal you also had to cook it down until it was re-dehydrated. It was a disaster, and a standard joke in our house.

My best friend even went so far as to buy me a copy of The I Hate to Cook Book, by Peg Bracken. Seriously. I think I cracked it open a few times, I may have even been feeling ambitious and tried a recipe or two. But I didn't take to cooking until much, much later in life.

Come to find out, The I Hate to Cook Book was quite the feminist's guide to the kitchen when it was first published back in 1960. I guess it was simply unheard of then that a woman might not enjoy cooking. Peg Bracken lived in Portland, OR and passed away October 23, 2007.

I think I still have that copy knocking around somewhere; maybe I should revisit it with new eyes. It's currently out-of-print.