When I started this blog I thought I’d be writing reviews of newly discovered fantastic recipes, posting pictures of my creations, and sharing the greatest hits from my accumulation of cooking and baking experience.  Something like Christy’s blog, but with not as good of photography.  But  somehow, I have really lost my cooking groove. 

    It’s been a slow decline, I think, starting with giving birth.  I quit cooking for at least a month when my son was born, then over the next year or two gradually started doing it again.  But the third year of his life has been a rotation through a list of boring meals you can count on one hand.  Soup & grilled cheese, pre-cooked chicken sausages with potato wedges, veggie burgers, spaghetti, and macaroni & cheese.  I managed a lovely array of BBQ brisket, potato salad, home made bread, and cake with pastry cream filling for my son’s birthday, and had a great time eating it (and the leftovers).  But the thought of producing something like that again makes me want to lay down on the floor and die.

    For someone who likes food as much as me, I feel like I should have more interest in making it.  I want to be Mark Bittman, able to turn a cluster of farmer’s market beets and arugula into a gourmet salad with nothing more at my disposal than water and salt.  I want to make Christy’s homemade flour tortillas for my tacos instead of opening up a box of Old El Paso.  I wish I were an expert pastry baker, producing flaky apple pies, or had buttercream frosting down to an art like my friend Crystal.  Instead, mine is always a little too runny or a little too stiff.  It looks OK in the bowl, but never transfers to the cake or cookie very well, which is unfortunate for someone for whom frosted sugar cookies are like a hit from a very, very good drug.

    My guess is that most people aren’t making breakfast lunch and dinner out of the America’s Test Kitchen Best New Recipes book every day.  But someone must be, right?  Why else does the New York Times publish super-foodie recipes all the time?  To make us feel like losers?  To make us want to go out to eat?  That’s what I feel like doing.  I’ll bet the reason the vegetarian restaurant up the street from me stays in business is not because there are that many vegetarians around, but because people see the recipe for curried carrot soup with potato samosas and homemade flatbread in the food porn section of the newspaper and think, “Ooh, that sounds good.  I’ll print out the recipe and make it someday!”  Then they realize the only way they’ll ever taste such a thing is to pay someone else to make it for them.  And they go find a restaurant.