Where it all started

As far back as I can remember, cooking with and for my family has been one of my favorite things to do.  I can remember both of my grandmothers preparing awesome home cooked meals and even though I didn't prepare it with them, I still remember the taste when it would hit my mouth.

During my high school years I finally started thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up. So, naturally I thought about becoming a chef.  In my junior year of high school, I started taking culinary arts classes through a local technical college. I was able to get high school and college credit for the classes I took and was really able to explore my own creativity with food. I just loved the thought of creating something new. I proceeded into the Culinary Arts program after High School with a dream to open a coffee shop and bakery sometime in the future.

Within a year of attending culinary arts school, my career path changed and I started attending a different college to get my Associates in Business.  At this school I met a young, handsome man and fell in love. After six months of dating he asked me to marry him and we did a year later.  We both looked for any job we could find and after being fed up with retail, I started looking for banking jobs (following in the footsteps of my father).  I got a job as a bank teller and I had plans of moving up the ladder because at the time I thought it just might end up being my career, but slowly I came back to the realization that I wanted to do something with cooking.  A couple years later my husband got a job offer in another state and threw our lives upside down.  Now, in the newness of everything, I've decided to get back to the basics and start cooking and being creative again.

In my three years of marriage, I have found it very interesting trying to cook for a picky husband. I am always wanting to try something fresh and new in the kitchen but my husband likes the same old stuff and usually only enjoys eating out. About a year ago, he decided that he wanted to veer away from meats and slowly become a flexible vegetarian (flexible because he doesn't like a lot of vegetables).  I have lost more battles in this cooking war than I've won and I need some new recipes to try and freshen things up a little.   I want to get creative again and maybe, in the end, cook a meal that my husband will really enjoy.

Objective: to prepare meals for my picky, vegetarian husband--who hates vegetables--that he will fall in love with and want to eat again and again (although he does get tired of meals fairly quickly).

I will post a new recipe every week with pictures of the meal and the approval (or disapproval) of my husband.

By the way, here are some of the funny titles that my brother-in-law, husband and I all worked on;

-Beauty and the Feast
-Stimulate the Palate
-Guess Who's Judging the Dinner?
-Finicky fricassee
-Culinarious
-Lost in Mastication


But eventually we settled on The Great Cooking Objective and I guess one question still remains, will I succeed in this cooking objective each week?  Follow me and find out...