BLT, deconstructed

Photo - Sheri Wetherell/ Flickr

I fell into a food slump this weekend. In fact, I couldn’t think of a single thing that sounded enticing for 3 whole days. That’s like a lifetime if you spend much of your day thinking about your next meal.  So here’s the truth: I subsisted on cheese & bread for 3 days. Specifically, grilled  American cheese & tomatoes (I told myself it wasn’t that bad because I was using organic American cheese. Um, right). By the end of day 3, my stomach had had it and  screamed “I need greens!”.  Luckily, my appetite for grown up food returned as well.   I wanted something with some substance, but still full of leafy greens (no offense to the regular ol’ green salad). Enter, the BLT salad.

Mustard & Herb Roasted Pork Loin

A cardinal rule of dinner parties goes something like “Cook what you know”. I totally broke that rule.

Pork loin is not something I’ve cooked before. Pork tenderloin tends to be my go-to (one tenderloin makes great portions for two people) and the manpanion is slightly obsessed with cooking the perfect pork chop.  But for this dinner party, I wanted something that was easy enough to cook for seven in one fell swoop rather than fussing over individually sized [fill in the blank].  Pork loin fit the bill. I perused the interweb and found a recipe that sounded easy and delicious.  Anything calling for 10 cloves of garlic can’t be bad, right?

Welcome Back!

Wine supply before...

San Francisco is a transient city.  People come and go every few years, meaning it’s difficult to keep friends around for more than a few years at a time.  Over the past few years, I’ve made a great group of friends. Unfortunately, in the last two years, many of these friends moved away,  making difficult decisions about leaving friends to return home to family, or embark on a new career path.  Soon I was lying awake at night thinking about how I was going to make new friends. Would I need to resort to a Craigslist ad? “Twenty something young professional looking to for friends. Enjoys cooking, drinking too much wine, playing scrabble, reading food magazines and books, watching HGTV, and going to bed at 9:30.”  Hmm, meeting new people would be more difficult than I thought.

Coming up…

I threw my very first, grown-up, classy (Cl-AHHHH-si) dinner party.

Until we broke a chair.

Menu & recipes coming soon….

Who doesn’t love pizza?

Working in the Technology industry in the Bay Area is always interesting – smart people, always something new to learn, and the pace is fast. The problem is, sometimes that fast pace leaves me with little motivation to cook when I get home.  In a city with many food choices, takeout is always an option, but I try to curb that to days I really need a break.  Boxed options aren’t really my thing since I don’t recognize most of the ingredients on the list (Full disclosure: There is a special place in my heart for  Annie’s White Cheddar Shells. Don’t judge). So, I try to have a few easy dishes on hand that I can throw together when all I want to do is go home, put on the yoga pants and watch “Real Housewives of [insert location here]”.  (Small aside: Please tell me you saw RHNJ: Reunion Part 2. Insane).  This pizza is one of them. It’s a relatively healthy, satisfying & quick.

Hi. My name is Liz, and I’m addicted to food blogs.

Hi. My name is Liz, and I’m addicted to food blogs. My Google Reader’s feed is primarily around food blogs. If I can’t be around the Internet for a few days, once I’m back on, I immediately hit up Tastespotting.  I stay up well past my bedtime because I’m perusing recipes who knows I’ll ever make. Yep, I love food blogs.

But mostly I love food. Growing up in a large family, food was always a thing that brought us together – sit down dinners were mandatory (as was dinner, much to my 5-year old picky eating chagrin). Today, when we’re together, you can find us congregating in the kitchen, my dad inevitably nibbling on something my mom is about to add to soup, stew, etc., to which she swats his hand away with a “Get out of there!!”.  My friend Helen and I spend much of our time chatting online (sometimes at work, shh.) about food.   My man friend and I have a habit of previewing menus online before we go to new restaurants.  Which is all why I decided to start my very own food blog.  I love food enough, why not show what I cook and where I love to eat? Of course, this means that I’m  showing my non-professional cooking and photography to the Interweb, but hopefully I’ll learn something along the way. Maybe even find some new food blogs….

OMG, I’m a food blogger.