Welcome To The Enchanted Spoon!

Hello everyone!

Just wanted to offer a quick thanks and welcome to my new followers! I hope you come visit and visit often, and tell your friends about The Enchanted Spoon too! Your fellowship means the world, as this blog is only as good as who reads it. It's about my perspective on food, and I try to take a different, more historical approach.

As the welcoming message states, for me, food is about the great circle of life. Honestly. The tradition of passing down recipes and making new traditions by incorporating new favorite ones is such an important part of our cultures around the world and about our own humanity. I truly believe in the different cuisines around the world, we can taste the heart, soul and driving force that makes that country or culture unique. And this blog tries to translate that for you and I hope inspires you as well to look at "food" as more than just something to snack on.

I've been working hard lately to beef up the blog (no pun intended) and so would like to introduce to you now some new features.

To the right of the main blogs, you'll find some new columns I'll be updating regularly:

Mission Possible: What Should I Attempt Next Poll is your chance to tell me what I should attempt next and write about. I'll offer a few choices so vote on what most interests you. I am ready and willing to be your culinary guinea pig so choose my next assignment!

Some of My Favorite Things is a section with links to websites that I love. They can include another chef or writer's site, a place to order specialty foods or seasonal items, or a website for particular cooking tools or equipment that I love.

My Cooking Bibles is a list of my favorite cookbooks. I didn't put a link because you can find them at any bookstore or online. These are books that have been most formative in my cooking abilities and philosophy and they are most certainly worth a read.

Restaurants Worth Your Time and Money is just that, a list with links to restaurants, cafes, bars and pubs that I have found to be consistently worth my time and money. Nothing irritates me more than spending a hundred dollars on a steak that wasn't even cooked right, when I could have spent $10 on the best pizza of my life. I'm always (ALWAYS) up to try new foods and great places, so if you have a recommendation then email me and you just might see a blog review and posting here! And you will get credit.

My Blog List is a quite literally a list of other food related blogs I read. If I post it then it's worth checking out.


In addition to these changes to the blog page itself, I'm also going to run a few recurring features I'd like to introduce now:

Week Night Yum Yum will be an easy, affordable, quick and straight forward recipe you can whip up on a busy week night. Most of us work and/or have little ones that prevent us (even me) from making Steak Diane or pasta from scratch every single night. Reality is we need to do things fast and healthy. This is real store-bought help that's not an MSG fest of Sandra Lee Horrors. This is 30 minute meals you'll actually be able to complete in 30 minutes, without odd combinations or a scratchy, never-ending irritating voice barking at you from the TV. This is real food MY way and you'll love it.

Kid Tested, Toddler Approved is a feature that will have a recipe that has been prepared especially with kids in mind. It will be healthy, uncomplicated, and completely consumable by your finicky toddler or kid in mind. I work with bold flavors, fun textures, and some tricks up the old sleeves that will get your kids to eat their proteins and (gasp!) even their veggies! And every single recipe I post you have my guarantee will be tested and approved by Miss Ecaterina (almost 3) and her partner in crime, Trajan (16 months).

____ Decoded: Everything You Wanted To Know (or Not) About ____ will be a feature on a particular food, ingredient, or spice that you've maybe heard of but have no idea what really is. MSG is a perfect example. We've all heard the name, but have no idea what it stands for or even what it looks like. I'll research these items and offer a candid explanation, and shall unveil the mystery behind strange foodstuffs.

And finally, I'll feature

Passport Travel as an occasional "exotic" recipe of a food we wouldn't commonly make at home. Through researching recipes myself, traveling there in person, or recreating as best as I can some of the global goodies the rest of the world has to offer us, my goal is to let your kitchen be the airplane. In these tough economic times it's hard for us to get away to someplace far and exotic. But taking advantage of our grocery stores, some research and guts in the kitchen (as in chutzpa, not literal innards of an animal...well, maybe if we do a Scottish recipe), we can travel there with our food. And learn a little more about a culture and its people.

I hope you'll all find the new and improved Enchanted Spoon a wonderful resource for your culinary adventures, and an amusing place to learn about different food stuffs that will inspire you to pick up a knife or buy that strange ingredient you can barely pronounce.

And if you have any suggestions or comments, I'm always reading and appreciating feedback. Every post has an "email me" option so you can reach my by clicking on the little white envelope (how cute) or of course, by posting comments (which I love to read!).

Thank you again for being a reader of The Enchanted Spoon!!!