Confession: I haven’t always loved to cook.

Oh sure, growing up my mom taught me the basics and how to follow a recipe, and I took the requisite Home Ec classes in school where we got to explore things like chocolate chip cookies and chicken cacciatore, but what I remember most was having to clean up all the dishes afterward. Boo!

However, my fondest memories in the kitchen are from when my two sisters and I would help my  mom do the annual Christmas baking. It seemed like there was just an endless list of recipes that Mom liked to prepare to give to our friends and to have on hand when company stopped by: shortbread, mincemeat tarts, gingerbread cutouts, homemade-jam-filled thumbprints, Mom’s own fudge, Nanaimo bars; cookie sheet after cookie sheet of perfectly rolled, sliced, dipped and sugared mouthfuls of heaven. Not to mention the Christmas music playing in the background and Mom pausing in the middle of boiling the fudge to grab one of us and dance around the kitchen. To me, the weather usually doesn’t put me in the Christmas spirit – only Elvis Christmas tunes can do that!

I finally got into cooking in my mid-twenties when I was living with my older sister, Dana, in Toronto. She took a brief cooking class and bought a couple of Henkel knives, a roasting pan and some stainless steel mixing bowls and off we went! She was the chef, I was the sous-chef and we started scouring the internet, the weekend Globe & Mail and the seasonal issues of Food & Drink magazine for recipes we’d try out together.

When Dana first moved away from home, my aunt gave her a recipe binder – ‘The Cook’s Book’ scrawled across the front in Sharpie – filled with recipes she had collected herself from family members and other favourites she had found, plus a lot of blank pages to fill with new recipes. Together, Dana & I filled that book up with all our new creations and when I decided to move back to Alberta, I spent a good amount of time copying a lot of those recipes into my own Cook’s Book. Today, I can’t even close that binder and it’s usually the first thing I pull out for inspiration for what to make for dinner.

I think those binders were also the seed of an idea for Dana & I to spearhead the project to create a family cookbook in 2008 and self-publish it on Lulu.com. We’re starting to talk about a 2nd edition, too, which (wow, it’s going to be a lot of work again, but…) I’m also excited about!

So welcome to my new little project of food blogging and I hope you find something you like to eat! Enjoy!

Love,

Karla