food as I love It.

Today I watched Julie and Julia a movie I have wanted to see since its release. I can't think of a single foodie I know who didn't consider Julia Child the pope of cooking and now in death a saint. I decided that this blog I created almost a year ago and never spent another day on was sitting in cyber space wasting space.

I have always loved food, preparing it, reading about it, eating it. I can remember as a little girl with my dad watching PBS, he loved the cajun cook Justin Wilson and I loved Julia. As a teenager and even young adult I almost felt silly watching and reading cookbooks. We didn't have cable back then, I still don't, so I would go on vacation and want to sit in the hotel and watch the food network.

Its funny because I have food memories just like I have other memories. I can remember the first time I tried Brie, chicken marsala, creme brulee, and hummus. Food really isn't a meal its and experience. Think of how we surround ourselves. We celebrate with food, we fall in love over food, we sulk with food and even morn with food.

Today not only did I watch the movie but we celebrated Christmas together as a family and I over heard a teenage boy, utter in awe as he walked around the bowls of food, "big families sure do know how to cook."

That got me thinking about how lucky I am, I watched my sister and mom go from pot to pot, stirring, checking, watching as if it were a child. Then one by one family members came in carrying bowl after bowl of dishes they are famous for or new ones they just had to share. Perfection!

Just last week my mom and I were out shopping and I am always drawn to the cheese section, not the Kraft packaged cheese and deli meat section. I mean the cheese section. My mom and I bought a pound of feta, she went home and had it on a salad and I had a grilled chicken sandwich with peppers, feta and black olives, we split it then we stood over the sharp Cheddar wheel. She told me how her parents raised cows and other livestock and would sale their milk and make butter but they always went and bought there cheese. She could remember her dad coming in carrying a huge wheel of cheese and how her mom would keep it on the table lovingly wrapped in cheese cloth. I thought how little we appreciate food, our local markets and the art of food these days. My grandmother cooked for the love of her family and the love of food. She never came to dinner in work cloths and she never served from her stove or out of pots. I don't even have serving bowls, but I will have some. I was lucky enough to have my great grandmothers hand written cookbooks, I was amazed to find a recipe from the 40's for home cooked fondant icing.

So I began to think that food can be more than nourishment and life is more than fast food and microwave meals.

I can't imaging I could ever cook 500+ recipes in 365 days but I am going to cook 2 new recipes every week for a year. I have a obsession with cook books but i am going to cook out of a book that I love and have already cooked several recipes and its called The Cook's Book.