About

Hi there and welcome to my kitchen! Here are some things that I imagine you are wondering about me.

Who are you?

My name is Amy. I am a busy mom and devoted wife, trying to get it all done.

I have been interested in cooking for as long as I can remember. However, I didn’t really start doing much of it until The Hubs and I got married. It has been a slow, painful (and in the beginning, often inedible) process, but now I feel like I have become a pretty darn good cook. There are few places I would rather be than standing in my kitchen to whip up something tasty for the people I love.

Being pregnant taught me to be very aware of the things that I put in my body and how they affect  how I feel. This realization has caused me to try to move as far away from prepackaged, over processed foods as I can.  Having said that though, I believe “health foods” are the devil and if you are going to bother eating something it should at least taste good. There is nothing better than a stick of butter softening on the counter for a batch of cookies, or bacon sizzling away in its own fat up on the stove. Basically, I try to stay somewhere in between Mama Pea and Paula Deen.

Do you really cook most of your meals with your kids around?

Yes. You really will find a chair pulled up to my counter with a kid standing on it most days. Usually if I am in the kitchen, so is the Little Dude.  I finally figured, if I was ever going to get anything done, I was just going to have to let The Dude come get in the kitchen with me. I love the fact that even when Dora is on, she will jump up and run to the kitchen with excitement if I ask her, “do you want to cook?” At this time, Monkey Mode is still a little too young to be in the kitchen with me though, and I actually do most of my baking and prep work for meals when she is taking naps.

Doesn’t this make cooking harder?

Not really. If you are a parent then I don’t even have to tell you that getting anything done with kids around is challenging, but if it something that you feel strongly about, you will just figure out away to make it work.

I actually never would have guessed it, but having The Dude standing next to me, anxiously awaiting her turn to stir has been one of the most fun and rewarding things we have ever done together.

Why do you call your oldest daughter “The Little Dude?” Isn’t she a girl?

Why yes, yes she is a girl. One time when she was a little baby, The Hubs looked down at her and said, “Awww…look at her. She’s just a little dude.” Well for some reason (probably the delirium of first time parent hood, and the fact that we are big time obnoxious nickname people), the name stuck and she has been affectionately known as Dude ever since.

Why do you call your youngest daughter “Monkey Mode?”

Because from the time she was born until even now, when the kid gets sleepy she looks exactly like this…I guess it has something to do with her huge eyes, I don’t know. But she always looked like a cute little baby monkey to me when she was about to fall asleep. She will lay with her head against mine or The Hubs’ chest and suck her finger and her eyes will get real wide.  Every time she would do this we would say, “Oh look! She’s going into Monkey Mode.” Seemed like a good enough nickname to us.

Why do you call your husband “The Hubs?”

Umm…well…I think that this one is a little obvious.

I’ll be honest with you though, his real nickname is Poops (and mine, if you really want to know is Doops). Now, you may be relieved to know that there is no story that goes along with this really. It actually just came along with an incredibly silly moment in Disney World right after we got engaged that I can hardly recall anymore. I just decided not to call him Poops on a blog about cooking. Make sense?

 

I spend my days dreaming up fun new things I could be cooking in the kitchen. So come on in, wash your hands, and pull up a stool at the counter. Let’s cook something!