Thoughts By Moonlight

I need to actually do something about my plan to write a cooking/foodie blog. In the last two days that I've been home sick with Roland, we've watched a bunch of food-related movies. Ratatouille, Mostly Martha, Julie & Julia, and although it isn't about food per se, after watching so many food movies all I could think about while I watched Sabrina (the remake) was the food they eat.

But anyway. I've decided that like Julie Powell I need a deadline and a more specific goal to get me going on this project.

My "theme" for my blog is the DIY Kitchen. I want to write about making things from scratch, about growing your own vegetables and herbs or at least getting your produce at a farmer's market. About canning and preserving, and doing things like making your fruit preserves with juice or honey instead of refined sugar.

Unfortunately due to other obligations-- work, grad school, Roland-- this is not something I will be able to do every day. So instead I will do it twice a week. I will make one meal and dessert completely from scratch every week, probably on the weekend, and blog about it with pictures. I will also bake a different loaf of bread a week, using the King Arthur Flour Baker's Companion for my base recipes.

Here's how I plan to break this down. My original idea was to write this as a cookbook, and I wouldn't present recipes for complete meals. Instead, I would give recipe "building blocks" and at the end of each chapter give suggestions on putting things together. My style isn't so much about the recipes, but about teaching people how to cook for themselves, and let them make the creative choices.

That idea won't work quite as well in a blog, because a blog needs to be about things I've actually cooked. So I'm going to start with my first entry about what those building blocks are. Then each meal will be chosen from those blocks, and the posts will be about how I chose what and why. I will tag the entries so if someone wants to go right to entries about cream sauces, they can do that.

Because I'm sick this weekend, I'm going to do something easy to start. From the protein/meat category, I choose chicken. Mostly because I already have some on hand. From the starch category, brown rice. I'll do a medley of steamed vegetables, and cover everything with either a sweet & spicy peanut sauce or something fruity, maybe with apricots and oranges. For the dessert, I'm going to make a variation on this fudge cake from King Arthur Flour because it is easy. Something fruitier would technically go better if I do a fruit sauce, but cakes with fruit tend to be much more labor-intensive.

Then on Sunday I will bake a loaf of bread. Probably I will do a whole wheat sandwich bread, just because. Then if I have any leftover at the end of the week I will make this as my dessert for next weekend, which I can't do this week because I don't have any homemade bread and that defeats the purpose of DIY.

I will add a link on this post to my new blog as soon as I get everything set up.

EDIT (8pm):

I decided to go with wordpress to familiarize myself a little with their system. I chose a minimalistic setup that is still pretty customizable. Eventually I may buy a domain or make it a subdomain of my current website, but I can't afford the extra $6/month right now with losing the hours at work.

So, until further notice: The DIY Kitchen

EDIT (1/30, 10am): I've also created a syndication feed here on LJ. thediykitchen