Welcome!

Welcome to my blog, aptly titled The Kitchen's a Mess.  To be honest, the rest of the house is a mess, too, but I'd rather not advertise that.

I'm envisioning this as a place to combine my interests in writing, cooking, and photography, and as a more productive time-suck than re-reading the latest Us Weekly.  I am neither a professional cook nor a professional photographer (though I have been a professional writer), so I can't really vouch for those aspects of this adventure.  Hopefully that semester of photography in college will amount for something.  I have mixed feelings starting this, since I'm pretty sure the last thing the world needs is another cooking blog, and I don't know that that I have anything insightful or clever to say.  But in an effort to keep myself gainfully occupied while being unemployed, I figure this as good of an activity as any.

A few weeks ago, also in an effort to occupy myself, I started going through my cookbooks and making a list of recipes that I want to make and of ones that I've already made.  My list of "To Make" already has over 200 recipes on it (majority of which are cookies, I think).  So that got me thinking.  I enjoy baking much more than I enjoy cooking, and I think that is because if I had my druthers, I'd eat baked goods all day.  The sweet tooth is strong in this one.  Which is not to say that I don't enjoy cooking, because I really do, and I do a lot of it.  But here's the difference: when it comes to cooking, I rarely follow a recipe to the letter or at all.  I use recipes more of guidelines or suggestions when cooking, and read recipes more for inspiration than for direction.  So what that means is that our dinners are usually pretty simple - a few ingredients, nothing too complicated, often dictated by either what is in season or what we have around the house.  This is definitely not how I approach baking, even things that I could bake in my sleep.  I always look at the brownie recipe, even though I've definitely got it memorized.  So part of this effort to list all the things I want to make is an attempt to expand my repertoire in the cooking department.  We'll see how that goes. 

First post complete!  Yay!