Welcome Back

It has been a long while since I have been here.  My last visit was almost a year ago.  I apologize for visiting so infrequently but my passion for cooking and baking waned last year as I struggled with my job. I was working the fry station and cooking (rather, frying) became the bane of my existence.  I stopped cooking at home and ate mostly a diet of Carl's Jr and frozen macaroni and cheese.  I would immediately come home from work, smoke until my lungs hurt, and watch reruns of the Gilmore Girls while eating terrible junk food. It was amazing to see how this one job completely ruined my passion for cooking and eating.  Eventually, I found another cooking job where I didn't want to slit my wrists everyday.  Slowly, my passion for eating was reignited.  Unfortunately I was laid off from that job so I am finding myself with lots of time to spare.  And since I have all this free time now, why not start blogging again.

Another reason why I stopped blogging was because I was intimidated by the other food bloggers who took great pictures of their food and made exotic dishes or technical dishes that I didn't have the time or patience to execute. I mean, hear I am, a professional chef, a graduate from culinary school, and these housewives and amateur cooks are schooling me at home cooking!  It made me feel stupid and inadequate as a professional chef. Not only, did I NOT have the time to make these dishes (I was working 8-10 hours a day plus I ski ALOT) but I didn't have the money to pay for the ingredients (a line cook make on average $10/hr).  Even if I did have the money to make these exotic dishes, I didn't want to spend hours in the kitchen to create one plated dinner.  For these housewives and amateur cooks, cooking was an escape from the pressures of the working world.  For me, cooking was my working world and the last thing I wanted to do was to spend more time in the kitchen.  As a result, when I did cook at home, my dishes were simple, required few ingredients and usually took less than 30 minutes to make.

So here is the deal: I'm not a millionaire rancher's wife,  I don't have a fancy kitchen or very much money to spend on ingredients but hopefully the recipes I post will be tasty and delicious.  This is how a professional (unemployed) line cook eats for herself.  I am also very interested in food policy so I will be posting articles about food policy along with posts about gardening, funny dog pictures and whatever I feel like.

Cheers,
Burnt

Listening to Adele -Rolling in the Deep