Yet another cooking blog

There are so many cooking and recipe blogs on the internet already, I know. I read a ton of them. I could never imagine trying to compete with amazing food bloggers like Molly Wizenberg and Heidi Swanson, but I do like to cook and I want to write more about food.

I learned to cook late in life. I was probably about 30 before I could do more than make some basic pasta or cook a stirfry that wasn't a soggy overcooked mess of vegetables. I look back at that time and, honestly, I don't even know what I ate. Processed foods? A lot of turkey sandwiches? Probably some combination of both. I remember trying to follow recipes and just getting hopelessly stymied by the fact that I didn't know what asparagus looked like when it was done or how to tell how long to cook a piece of chicken. A lot of my early attempts to cook by following recipes just failed (I think a bit part of my problem was that I was always trying to cook things on too high of a temperature, which resulted in a lot of food that was burnt on the outside and raw on the inside -- yum!).

I've learned a lot over the last few years. Now I don't eat much processed foods and although I still love a turkey sandwich, I've attempted much more complicated recipes than just making pasta and heating up some sauce. And most of the time it even comes out! I like to make bread and I've even tried canning jams now a few times. I've gotten to the point where I'm no longer a slave to recipes (though I still follow recipes for the most part, it's just that my 'following' sometimes becomes more of an 'interpretation').

I have small selection of cookbooks [I used to think I had a lot, but then I started seeing food bloggers talk about having hundreds!] I love Mark Bittman, anything from Cooks Illustrated, and Alton Brown. They've all taught me a ton about cooking and I still consult them all the time.

Anyhow. This is all my longwinded way of saying that this is my new food blog. I've called it 'cooking around the internet' because it will mainly be a way to save and review recipes I've found online that I've made at home. I often make a lot of changes to them or find that the way they explain things isn't always as user-friendly for new or inexperienced cooks as it could be. I hope that, by writing about my cooking and food-love here, that I can help test recipes that I find online (and help point out good recipes and save people from the myriad of bad recipes online) and also perhaps convince some non-cookers to try their hand in the kitchen.