You Can Call Me Betty

I wasn't so down with the whole cooking thing. I'm not bad at cooking, per se, I just didn't enjoy the process. This did not, however, prevent me from being mesmerized with every show on the Food Network. Perhaps it was because my skills started out a little rough. When I first got married I asked my Mom how I went about making a baked potato. I still have the "recipe" written down and stored in my recipe box. Scrambled eggs were a mystery too, poor Aaron. 

There was something about the getting the recipe, buying the groceries, making the food, seeing if it even tasted good, then doing a bizillion dishes that had me thinking it's wasn't even worth getting into. I stuck to recipes that were easy, affordable, and that I liked, and I basically made them every week.

I had a friend tell me, "I was talking to another friend of mine about how you make the same things every week..." I didn't even hear the end of her sentence, because I was too busy focusing on the little piece of me that died after she made that statement. I was beyond embarrassed. Mortified, if you will. I vowed to be better, to make a better effort, to try harder in the kitchen and get over all of the voices that told me it wasn't worth it.

When I was pregnant with Grace I craved a very specific set of foods. Brunch foods. Waffles, pancakes, and most importantly crepes. I could have eaten crepes every day. The problem was, was that I didn't know how to make them and my Mom was 3,000 miles away. So, I taught myself how to make them and proceeded to make them every sunday for 40 weeks straight. What I learned in that process was that the more you make something, the easier it becomes. In fact, if you know what you're doing in the kitchen, cooking can be fun and not stressful. 

I've been refining my skills, slowly but surely, and recently decided that I wanted to make homemade bread to use for sandwiches and toast (etc) rather than buying store bought bread. Shocker, considering I didn't know how to bake a potato 5 years ago. I located a cook book, blew the dust off of it, and found a recipe that struck my fancy. The whole process was thrilling. Whole wheat flour, yeast, the smell as it baked in the oven. Somewhere in the mix of it all I fell in love and I never wanted to look back. I love baking bread. One of these days I'm going to brave cinnamon rolls, and homemade bagels, and french toast with homemade challah bread. Who knew that I would ever find baking bread so thrilling. I can feel the domestic 50s housewife within me grow and smile, and I think I'll name her Betty.

Day 20: Bokeh (I didn't know what it was either, but it is the aesthetic quality of the blur in the photo)