Welcome, Food Fanatics!

Why am I writing about food? Like the 8 million other “Julie & Julia” wannabes out there, I want my “You Like Me! You Really Like Me!” phone call, of course. But in all seriousness, no writer can fake an obsession with food, and no food lover can write about food the way he or she would write about quarterly earnings. This is why we blog. This is why I blog.


I can’t remember when I started cooking, but food was never something that had to be forced on me. I never ordered off the kids’ menu, nor did I shy away from exotic dishes that even some adults won’t eat. I ate fried calamari for the first time at age 4 (“Mommy, I’m eating squid!”). On snack day, I didn’t want to bring brownies, I wanted to bring clam chowder. In college, when my dorm-mates were ordering pizza and subs, I figured out how to make linguine with clam sauce and risotto in a hot pot. I called it “Hila-rice.”

Until today, I never recorded my culinary experiments in any logical manner. Writing down my recipes meant scribbling a few ingredients on a post-it and sticking it in the inside front cover of one of my many cookbooks. I think this blog will streamline my process. After all, trying a new recipe is very similar to chem lab; you have to start with an if/then hypothesis:

“If I combine this stuff and add bacon, butter, and a splash of whiskey, then it will taste good.”

Can you imagine what the world would have been like if the Internet had been available to Thomas Edison or Charles Darwin? What if Charles Ranhofer, Auguste Escoffier, or Irma Rombauer had been able to blog? What if Julia Child had been able to tweet about her trials and tribulations?

Again, this is why I blog. I want to record my progress as it is happening. I want to share which recipes worked, which ones flopped, which I‘d serve to my best friends, and which I wouldn‘t serve to my worst enemies. I don‘t want to sit down with wads of post-its in each hand and try to turn dozens of scribbles into something that makes readers want to eat, I want to show you the process.

On that note, it’s time for dinner!