Finding Delicious - A Mission Statement

Let's get this party started, shall we? Welcome to the culinary world of Chalna. This will be an interesting ride and I am excited to get the ball rolling. I am starting this blog for several reasons, the first of which being that I LOVE TO COOK. I quit a very busy career in January of 2008, when my son was 6 months old, in order to raise him and take care of our family. Prior to that first morning at home with Colin, we lived a very different lifestyle. We are self-professed foodies who have always had a passion for eating, but certainly no time for actually cooking it ourselves. We ate out constantly and led the typical fast paced lifestyle of a childless couple in their twenties...we worked hard, played hard and ATE a lot! When we had Colin, our priorities were suddenly completely different. I was only back at work for 3 months after my maternity leave before I left to come back home. We wanted Colin to be raised by me and decided to give it a try. This has been the greatest decision that I have ever made and also one of the most life altering. We found ourselves in a world of budgets, saving and cutting back. The most immediate change would be eating out. We could no longer spend a fortune on restaurants and the very first change to be made was learning to eat at home. I found myself standing in a kitchen that only knew me from visits to the coffee pot and wondering where to even begin. All I knew was that I had to give up eating out, but I was NOT going to give up delicious.

I started with a couple of cooking magazines picked up in the line at the grocery store and it was not long before I was having a blast. I was surprised to find that I was not only having fun, but I was also good at it! It never crossed my mind that cooking would come naturally to me, but it certainly did. I found myself picking up more magazines and books and watching endless hours of Food Network. I started to find chefs that I liked, recipes that were easy and tips that taught me what the heck I was doing. I started to look forward to planning meals and as months turned into years, I stopped looking for easy recipes and started looking for anything that tickled my fancy. We love robust food with a lot of flavor and we will try just about anything. That love of all things food has sent me down many different paths and brought us some really amazing dinners. I have learned that a recipe is a guideline and that you have to make it your own. I have learned that if a recipe calls for two cloves of garlic, we like four. My newest passion is reading food blogs and trying out recipes that seem to call out to me. This can be a lot of trial and error with lots of success and the occasional rather blah dinner. Which brings me to my idea for this blog. I love to talk shop, so to speak, so I will write about the recipes I try and what I think. I will tell you where I found the recipe, what I thought about the outcome and if I would make it again. I will try it and let you know if you should, too. I am just a regular mom who loves to cook. I am certainly not a professional! If I find something yummy, I want to share it and I hope that you will do the same for me. Let's be cooking buddies, shall we?

Thank you for stopping by and I hope that you have as much fun as I do...let's talk about delicious!!