The Beginning

After months (okay maybe years) of talking about starting a blog on food and cooking, we are finally doing it. We both love cooking and sharing recipes we've discovered and fallen in love with (and every so often hate). Beyond that, though, we both see food as a point of togetherness and sharing, with coming together for a meal as a time not only for nurturing ourselves and our families literally, but also as a time in which we pause and mark our lives.

Janet here: We got the name for the blog from an essay I wrote about my mother's cookbooks. When my mother died a decade ago, I discovered that she had written commentary in her cookbooks. "Bob [my father] really loved this," read the one next to the recipe for horseradish meatballs in her coverless, stained McCall's Cookbook. "Janet and Kellee [my sister] did NOT like this," read the comment by tomato aspic. I realized as I leafed through them that these were more than simply recipes; these were my mother's journals, her way of recording our lives together.
So Rachel and I started talking about this idea and realized that sharing recipes was one of the ways that we've remained connected even though we're now living 3,000 miles apart. It made our lives still seem somehow connected, and we thought if this is happening to us, it's probably happening to other people too.

Rachel here: When I first moved across the country from my family at the age of 19, one of the ways in which I navigated my homesickness was by making food that my mom made for my brothers and me when we were growing up. Now that I have a partner and we are growing a family of our own, one of the ways I bridge the two parts of my family is through food. As my mom and I have discovered our shared love of cooking (alright, let's be real here--we're pretty fond of the eating component, too), though our kitchens are thousands of miles apart, our exploits in them have become a shared space space of sorts.
Anyway, we hope you enjoy our blog and would love to hear your own tales of culinary trials and errors, as well as about the ways in which food functions in your life.