Welcome to the soup kitchen

Welcome to my new blog.  I have been blogging for several months about fiber art, and thought it might be just as much fun to write about what goes on in my kitchen as what goes on in my studio.  I hope you'll enjoy it too.

I like to fix meals but I don’t particularly want to spend hours in the kitchen or obsess over recipes.  I want to eat healthy foods with a minimum of salt, sugar, fat and preservatives and a maximum of vegetable matter.  We’re not vegetarians by any means, but we try to make vegetables a major part of practically every meal.  We’re willing to eat canned or frozen foods, but we read the labels carefully and don’t buy things with a lot of salt, sugar or other strange additives.

My favorite kind of meal is one that starts with reconnaissance in the kitchen.  What’s on hand, what needs to be eaten soon, what’s left over in the fridge.  Then I call upon a favorite plan (I don’t like to use the word recipe because I rarely follow the plan exactly).  Sometimes the plan gets executed to closely resemble meals of the past; other times it takes off in a different direction.

My approach to meal preparation is something like my approach to fiber art – start with some ingredients and a general plan, then use your good judgment and improvise.  I have lots of cookbooks, one or two of which I actually consult, but mainly I cook by instinct.  In this blog I’ll share some of my plans and favorite ingredients with you – maybe one will be just the thing you need to jump-start your dinner tonight.