There and Back Again...

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If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. 

                           ~ J. R. R. Tolkien

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If you know me and you're keeping count, this would be my third attempt at blogging. I say that because I don't want to scare any new followers into thinking something terrible happened if I don't update this, when in reality, I'm just unbelievably lazy. To those who are new, I welcome you. To the returning, thanks for coming back. Again.

My first food blog, Fork Off, was me wanting to get not only recipes, but my experiences as a disgruntled kitchen slave out to the masses (masses, of course, referring to probably 7 people from twitter). But during this endeavor, I was working a full time job in a restaurant as said kitchen slave, and I just wasn't up to spending the short amount of free time I had blogging about the food was the bane of my life a few hours prior. So sadly, as awesome of a name Fork Off was, it was dead on arrival.

Then came my poetry blog where I tapped into my high school self and tried to bring a level of romance and passion to the internet that didn't involve lotion or tissues. Unfortunately, even though it was easy to copy and paste from my typed up works or post videos of my favorite poets, I succumbed to my laziness and just gave up. I always felt poetry was an art, and like any art, it had an audience that loved it and everyone else who didn't care if it existed or not. So just like high school, I decided to stop pretending people cared about poetry. I might go back one day though. Everyone has a little hopeless romantic in them.

And now here we are. Coming up on 2 years of being unemployed. My wife, a Registered Nurse, is making just enough to support us comfortably. So the added stress that was put on our relationship by me working ungodly hours of the night turned out to not be worth it. More importantly, our little man, Sebastian, needed to be taken care of. And if I were to get a job, the common salary of a cook would've been just enough or less than the cost of daycare or a sitter. So it only made sense...

I'm not starting this because I have oodles of time to kill since I'm unemployed. If you don't have a kid, let me just say that it is quite the job taking care of one. Add on keeping up with house work and cooking meals, and I'm lucky to scratch an itch during the day. No, I'm doing this blog because I wanted to keep in touch with what I know. And as much as I hate it as a profession, I know cooking. I know the kitchen, the tools and the trade. I am the product of an overpaid education that vomited me into an underpaid career. But don't get me wrong, as I've said before, I'm not God's gift to foods blogs or cooking, I just want to have an outlet to pour what I know into it. Since my first day on the job some 9 or 10 years ago, I hated the restaurant industry. Fast forward to now and I still do. I hate everything it does, and the way it does it. But when I'm home and I'm cooking a meal for my family, that's where my passion comes out.

That's where it matters.

Not in some trendy restaurant or a fancy plated dessert.

Home is where the heart is.

So now that you know me a little better I hope you enjoy what I do here. Hell, I hope I keep up with it this time. You can look forward to recipes and stories of why restaurants are evil, all with heavy doses of my comforting snarky demeanor that only a cook can bring to you. I may even throw in some life lessons and tidbits I pick up along the way.

Here's to hoping its all worth reading.