Hi – I’m Bridget
I’m a self-taught, food obsessed, good ingredient hunter and lover of transforming everyday staples into delicious and uncomplicated dinners.
This is Dave. Husband, aka “hubster”. He’s critical to all my adventures including getting this blog up and running. He is also very importantly, my primary taster!
Story behind this food blog
It really does start with Dave. We got married late in life – it took me a long time to find him… My focus had been on my education and climbing the corporate ladder… Then I realized I now had a family and I was responsible for us eating healthy and cost effectively -so I set out to become a good cook.
Now days, I’m a big proponent of eating delicious food cost effectively (#WhyEatOut). In this blog you will find what’s cooking in my kitchen… a little bit of everything…from roasts to salads to breads and cupcakes. I’ll be keeping it real… sharing healthy foods and the ‘get-your-fat-pants-ready’ splurges…
I love cooking and having people over and enjoying food with my friends and family. I am typically focused on providing nourishing meals (#VegItUp) without compromising quality or breaking the bank. I find great satisfaction in hosting dinner parties that are low key, while still (somewhat?!) impressive and budget friendly. I hope to share insight into cost-effectively producing good wholesome and nutritious dinners for those who you care about. My bestie sometimes pokes fun at me for my overstuffed freezer and larger-than-it-ought-to-be pantry. But when you can pull off a full healthy meal without leaving the house, I call that a major win!
I’ll tell you what worked well, what didn’t (#KeepingItReal), what bargains I scored, how I stay within budget and what tools I’m using to help me in the kitchen.
My Inspiration:
1968 – Nana, Mom, Aunt Joan, Aunt Kay
Recipes can be heirlooms passed down, shared, and cherished through generations. There are many stories about the amazing cook my Nana was. As I come across her recipes and make them – I’ll add them here. Some are already staples for me… (Snickerdoodles, anyone?) Once Nana told me – anyone can cook – you just have to follow a recipe. In honoring my Nana’s memory, I try to focus on the simplicity and goodness of her era. If it wasn’t part of my grandmother’s kitchen, I tend to question its place on my plate.
With that in mind, I do try to stick to basics and most of my recipes do that. But I’m also a realist and sometimes we need to lean on something processed to get dinner on the table and food into the bellies. Balance is key… I try my best to avoid processed foods and cook from scratch where and when I can.
I collect and generate recipes from a variety of sources – be it restaurants, fellow food blogs, cooking shows, online platforms like Google and Pinterest and lots and lots of cookbooks.
One time, a leader of mine in the corporate world asked me what the last (implied “business”) book was that I’d read. I paused, I considered, I said, “do cookbooks count?” I have quite the collection of cookbooks that I love to sit and read. When I go traveling I love to buy the 4-H Recipe collections (all local mom favorites) to see what they cook in that town….and when I go Antiquing I love to get old cookbooks to see what was what, back then. One of my favorites is my “Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking” from 1956 where it talks about the housewife’s duties in the kitchen… (Have table linens & dinner service set, and your lipstick on when your husband gets home from work type of thing!)
Depending on the day, my mood, and the contents of my vegetable drawer, I might directly replicate a recipe, combine recipes or purely use them for inspiration. As such, you may get some recipe reviews of other bloggers / recipe creators – and recipes as is / fully accredited to the originator — and other times you’ll get my thoughts and updates and changes.
Cooking is an ever-evolving art.
My goal with this blog is to create and share the recipes that I’m cooking in my kitchen — so I can :
- Create and Share: I love experimenting in the kitchen and developing new recipes. Many of the dishes you’ll find here are my own creations, inspired by my culinary adventures, dinners eaten out etc.
- Inspire and Adapt: I often find recipes that I tweak to suit my tastes or dietary needs. I want to share these adaptations in case you too would like them – and also to inspire you to get creative in your own kitchen.
- Curate and Preserve: There are countless amazing recipes out there that have inspired me or become go-to recipes in my kitchen. I too want a place that I can rely on to have my recipes well into the future.
My recipes are not (YET) organized !
As I begin this adventure, I have begun gathering my favored recipes:
- From my bursting-at-the-seems recipe book mom gave me when I first moved out of the house with all the 3X5 cards falling out because the glue has disintegrated since 1988…
- All the hundreds of recipes I have pinned. Sometimes it takes 10 min to find the recipe I’m looking for – although I have segregated folders – i.e. “Recipes – Chicken” …. do you know how many chicken recipes I have pinned over the years ???? Some are still aspirational and others are regulars on the dinner table.
- I have a shared OneNote or is it now a google doc (?) with my friend Marie as she tries to keep her favored recipes available. (Baby White Castles anyone?)
- I have probably another hundred recipes on food.com – that I’ve been using since the early days – before it was bought by Warner Brothers / Discovery…. Back then it was 100% crowd sourced (before that was even a term) and it was called Recipe Zaar. And you could rely on the recipes since there were ratings and reviews from everyone.
- I have cooking magazines EVERYWHERE. Still trying to get through the piles and piles that I have stacked over the years to be read… wait for it ….. when I retire! I HAVE been getting through some of them! But regardless of getting through them or not — the issue with the magazines is that you then have to save the paper recipe or save it to the proprietary recipe box in the sky or Pin the recipe. While that seems logical – I’ve been burned…
- Magazines have come and gone. Most have gone the way of the dodo bird. My all time favorite was Gourmet Magazine (1941 – Nov 2009). Man did I love that magazine. The NYT said, “Gourmet was to food what Vogue is to fashion”. I would sit and dream of fancy dinner parties, being a good chef or cooking like my Nana…etc. I would find the best recipes in the magazine and then go online and save them to my online recipe box. But then they went out of business. Most of their recipes made their way to Epicurious.com (Thank God).
- Gourmet magazine subscriptions were converted to a Bon Appetite subscription and I began receiving that magazine. It was good – but it was NO Gourmet…. Again I saved favored recipes / added reviews to their recipe box. So you ask me – what’s wrong with that situation ??? Well, with the changing of life – everything is going digital…Magazines are online and gotten with apple subscription service, or through the library (kindle) etc… So it’s no surprise that subscription magazines aren’t very profitable. And then what happened ???? My Epicurious / Bon Appetite / Gourmet magazine recipes that I’ve saved and commented on and provided my tweaks online, used for years, saved for years, paid for via the original subscriptions are now behind a paywall – which I find offensive. I was a contributing member of that community way back in 2007 – saving recipes found via my subscription, adding reviews and helping to make their platform better. (Does anyone remember the ratings were 4 forks…?). Hubster bought me a subscription for Xmas and I’m going to make and share my favorites. (Similar to ideas, facts and history, there isn’t copyright protection in recipes as a lists of ingredients. This is stated by the U.S. Copyright Office.). Ala Julia and Julia ?
- And, if loosing Gourmet weren’t enough…there was a magazine called Fine Cooking – my friend Linda shared that one with me – as a Christmas gift for many years. (What an awesome gift that was!). That was almost as good as Gourmet. Again – off I went saving the recipes and pinning them and keeping the reviews. In Sept 2022 they shut down and the website was no longer available… Poof… and it was gone. Thankfully there is a community of devoted people who have selflessly created an index, sourced the magazines from people who still have hardcopies (I have about 12 – 15 mags to donate to that crew…) and have imaged and otherwise protected the vast majority of that magazines recipes. However, Pins no longer work and it’s a bit of effort to go searching…
Websites shut down, blogs go offline, or magazines stop printing. I want to preserve these gems so they don’t get lost in the digital void.
Transparency is important to me. Whenever I share a recipe inspired by another source, I will :
- Acknowledge the Source: I will give credit to the original creator of the recipe. You’ll see links and mentions of where the recipe came from if it’s not my original.
- Share My Adaptations: If I’ve tweaked a recipe I’ll tell you that too. This way, you can see how the dish evolved and maybe even find new ways to adapt it yourself.
Bottom line – what you will find here on my blog is what’s cooking in my Kitchen.
I’m super happy you stopped in, read my story and I really hope you find something that appeals to your pallet and your family and friends also enjoy the results.
Before you go, one caveat in the vein of keeping it real… I retired from corporate America in 2023 and have started this blog (from scratch – learning Word Press / SEO etc.) Feb 2024 – to share my joy and provide inspiration and offer ideas. I was working on it as the mood struck, till I realized I needed a deadline and a Go-Live date (some things don’t change) else it would meander for far too long. June 15, 2024 is the go live date. I’m working hard to get a LOT of recipes organized, cooked, and up for our enjoyment and use. Whether it’s a baked treat or a low-calorie dinner (because we may be watching our weight), or a splurge because it’s time…that’s what you’ll find here. I’ll be keeping it real and doing my best to take good photos… Please cut me a little slack as I get going, OK?
I’d love to hear from you – to let me know how the recipe went, or to ask for help with a certain ingredient or recipe or nutritional need.
From my kitchen to yours… Bridget
Pulled Pork and Homemade Buns
Frequently Asked Questions
Camera: My iPhone 14 (super fancy, I know!!!)
Cook a lot for everyone and have them ask for recipes. Have thousands of recipes that you reference and have no idea what tweaks you ‘routinely’ make and say to yourself, I should write these down sometime… Have a bit of creativity and time (retirement) to learn new skills and give something a go…
Cooking is Heat + Food. Baking is chemistry. So it depends. Cooking – absolutely change up what you need to make it friendly for your family. Baking – you need to be a much more careful – leaving out leavening, for example, could result in complete failure!
I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate. – Julie Child