In My Kitchen

“About” pages always bring out my deep-seated tendencies towards shyness and self-deprecation. I prefer to leave them blank. In the interest of avoiding vagueness I’ll say the following:

I’m Laura. I’m the happily married wife to one very cool computer geek. We have one adorable geek-in-training daughter. She’s about a year and a half. I think I was born for motherhood but I’m definitely a work in progress when it comes to the housekeeping part. I do not sew or scrapbook (not usually anyway) or garden. I can knit, but poorly.

love food. I love talking about it, experiencing it, experimenting with it and especially sharing it with people I love.

I do not consider myself an very good cook and definitely not a chef but I know how to boil water and my husband generally considers my food edible. He’s picky so I figure he’s a good standard.

Our house is dairy and cow-product free. We really try to eat mostly “whole” foods – organic, close to the original form and definitely prepared at home. I’m not a fan of the boxed, canned, frozen, etc although I still haven’t broken our Newman’s Marinara sauce habit. Add what you like, take away what you don’t like.

For butter I generally use Earth Balance Buttery Spread which is a palm oil (not soy) based margarine. I’ve used this for almost four years and it’s great in everything from baking to sauces and gravies. I almost never make main dishes that call for milk (like casserole) but in baking when I need milk I use Rice Dream or (only for my two favorite cake recipes) VitaSoy Original Soy Milk (did you know that Silk is owned by a tobacco company?).

I don’t generally follow recipes. They give me hives. Sort of like routines and planning ahead. But that’s a different page. My exception to this rule is baking – too many mistakes have taught me the wisdom of recipes when baking. Otherwise I tend to follow my gut instinct. This leads to some inconsistency with some dishes but when I get one just right, I do try to write down the formula in our family cookbook. Sometimes free-form isn’t the best way.