Squiddys Kitchen Creations: An Introduction

i LOVE to cook. cooking for me is akin to a really fun experiment in chemistry and physics, only you get to EAT your results! yum! i think my love of cooking was born early in my childhood. some of my very earliest memories involve food, and as i come from a very large family of folks who lived in many various places throughout europe for a good portion of their lives, there was always an abundance of crazy delicious dishes every time the family got together. i remember watching my opa toss pizza dough from my highchair and playpen. i remember the family fall honey and berry harvest at my aunt and uncles farmhouse which was always the start of a wonderful weekend-long cooking extravaganza involving a kitchen full of cooks, a house full of children, and so many good foods you couldnt count or try them all. i remember standing on a dining room chair to reach the kitchen counter so that i could perform various "food experiments", an activity which my mama inexplicably encouraged no matter how much of a mess i made, and how bizarre the resulting "recipes" were. she taught me that it was perfectly fine to try different things together and experiment with various cooking methods and so on, but also that i must eat what i make, because otherwise its just "playing around", and my mama was not fond of waste. she educated me on the basics of cooking and food safety so that i would know enough not to make something poisonous or undercooked, and made sure that i knew to come to her if i ever had a question about anything. in fact, this is one of the things i most love and respect my mother for, her persistence in always giving me a full and honest answer to any curiosity i might have, to the best of her knowledge and abilities, and avoiding at all possible costs the dreaded "because i said so" or "that's just the way it is" response. (although i suspect this may have been partly due to my steadfast refusal to simply accept these sort of answers and instead question the matter further, on of my most enduring and endearing qualities. this one is also most likely rubbed off from her. thanks mom!) i have always thought this was the main reason i became so interested in science at such a young age, a cultivated insatiable curiosity of the natural world.
but that's a tale for another day... moving on back to the COOKING!!!

i still do a great many "food experiments" only now they are pretty much all delicious. (and i make a bigger mess!) so in order to exercise my blogging discipline, and further my recent efforts at regularity (not the fiber kind) i will be writing about my various kitchen capers (not the pickled kind). first up is Squiddys Kitchen Creations: Things I need For My Kitchen, Part 1.

Bon Appetit!