A New Beginning

I have been thinking a lot about this blog the last few days. I realized I had no point. Originally this was a traveling blog and then it told my adventures in academia. Now I am pretty boring. So I tried to think of blogs I liked. After filling out a subscription for my third cooking magazine, I did my daily check of my three favorite cooking blogs and I thought...could I? Immediately, the answer came: NO! I don't know how to cook! I never seem able to follow a recipe or time a dinner right. The side dishes and main dish get done at totally different times. I often get halfway through a recipe to realize I am missing a key ingredient or did something horribly wrong. I can't tell anyone about cooking or food.

Then I decided maybe it would be more interesting to talk about learning to cook. Not in any kind of regimented way, but my experiments, mishaps, accidents and the occasional standout dish.

A quick key for you new readers:

Me= Badger Girl: a girl in the Midwest soon to be married and trying to learn how to cook nutritious, delicious and adventurous meals

Fiance = Manatee: He is a key player but being an English major and a bit type A, I hate writing fiance because I can't figure out how to get the little accent...well and also because I lovingly call him a manatee. It's not a weird pet name nor does he look like a manatee. But if you have ever seen them feed manatees at Sea World, you know they eat a lot of lettuce (and now the rest of you know that too) and Manatee eats more lettuce than any human I have ever met. Most of my dishes end up on top of lettuce unless I give him my pouty face and then he puts his salad in a separate bowl (though I suspect when I am not looking he puts it on the lettuce before he eats it).

That's all you need to know for now. This weekend I have committed to baking my future father-in-law a rhubarb pie as well as cooking several side dishes. I had hoped to use our CSA (Community Shared Agriculture) for inspiration but all I got were radishes, lettuce (Manatee and I were happy about the salad mix), green onions and garlic scapes (future post will be Garlic Scapes: WTF). If you have any ideas for sides dishes using these ingredients, please do let me know.