Again, Christmas in the desert surprised me.

First of all, it seems as cold as the Seattle I left a little tiny bit over 2 years ago. It has rained constantly all day.

In all actuality Seattle is under a foot of snow, has been for a week, and many are out of electricity. My wishes go out to them.

In fact, the big worry this week was whether or not my 18 year old son, living in Seattle, would be able to make it from his house to the airport for his Christmas Visit. Thank God for his friend’s Mom, Shannon, because apparently she was the only mobile driver in all of Seattle. She drove a good 10 miles when everyone else was stranded or stuck in their driveways, picked him up in the ice and snow, TOOK HIM TO GET HIS PAYCHECK… DEPOSIT IT AT THE BANK… And THEN delivered him safely to the airport door, an additional 5-10 miles away from her home.

THANK YOU SHANNON!!! You ROCK!

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I have addressed the fact that my mother was not the best of cooks in a previous post… and, having not been the best of cooks, I think there was a little bit of recipe withholding that went on…

A competition of sorts.

Ingredient Coveting if you will.

Please, allow me to explain.

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I am shocked. Just utterly beffuddled. People who live in the greater Phoenix Metropolitan Area… perhaps all 6 something million of them, don’t know about dungeness crab! I only had two of them over last night (the other is a transplant from Detroit) but they have all 3 lived here for quite some time…

Let me back track a little bit. Spud was out last week and ran into a friend of ours, and somehow (this would be a long winded treck) their conversation turned to crab. Spud mentioned that I had just cooked a live crab the other night, and our friend was immensly curious.

Live crab? Here in Arizona? Where does she get them? What kind are they? How do you cook a live crab?

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I love Thai food. I love Vietnamese food. Well, to be honest, I love most foods. Duh.

That being said, when I go to a restaurant and order something really good it becomes my obsession to figure out how to make it. Not because I don’t want to pay the prices at a restaurant… Believe me, there are days when I would give my last dollar to eat a wonderful meal in an incredible atmosphere with a bunch of friends… and have someone else do the dishes! No, it’s not because of that. It’s just that in my own twisted little Cookbyist mind it becomes a challenge. A Bobby Flay just walked into my kitchen throwdown of sorts.

I will research, and read, and Google it all. I will find a store that carries the ingredients even if it’s 10 miles out of my way. I will add a dash of this and a pinch of that, experimenting with different recipes until I find just the right one… The right combination… Much like my Pho’ Soup Challenge.

One of those recipes was Thai Red Curry Coconut Chicken.

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This recipe is in Loving Memory of Kathleen.

She is not dead.

She moved to Indiana.

I have had a revelation.

I love to write. I love to write about food, ingredients, recipes, cooking techniques… For God’s sake, I could lovingly, longingly write about grocery shopping! My ‘revelation’ is that I can’t stand writing out recipes. It’s painstakingly technical. It takes all of the creativity of cooking and throws it out the window, looking for exactness (if that’s a word). It takes the art of doing, into the rigidity of explaining how to do it.

I want to cook for you. I will even do the dishes. But if the recipe section of this website grows slowly, understand that it’s the math class of my highschool years, the bane of this bloggers existence.

That being said… here are the new recipes I have entered in last few nights days.

Hot Crab Dip
Spicy Deviled Eggs
Salmon w/ Cucumber Dill Sauce
Cioppino
BBQ Chicken Tacos
My Favorite Salsa
Lasagna
Brown Sugar Pork Chops w/Mango Salsa
Damned Good Clam Chowder

After the weekend, it will all be much more exciting!

My Mother, God rest her soul, was truly the antithesis of a cook. The arch nemesis of a chef. The prototypical, should never have have had 5 children, kind of cook.

But, being Irish Catholic, she just buried her head in the sand, and faked it.

My father was enormously successful when I was young and my mother was given the opportunity to design not only a complete remodel of our tiny little house, but she included a Martha Stewart inspired kitchen for herself (30 years before Martha appeared).

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Tomato Basil Soup

Yes, this is a food blog, but it’s also a place to get recipes. While I have been blogging my little heart out, I haven’t really entered in a bunch of recipes. You see, there are blogs where people just go copy and paste recipes from other sites online, and then there are blogs where the writer has actually tried the recipe, adapted the recipe, and/or Dr’d It UP!!!

I am not a copy/paste kind of gal. So I will be hand typing in each recipe as I go, adding additional comments on adaptations that I have already made, or would bet my bottom dollar would work out deliciously.

I will let you know which recipes are new so you can go check them out, because they won’t be in blog form, they will be in the recipe tab up above.

And, can I just say… I know people are looking at this site. I know because people are calling or emailing me about what they like (or don’t).

PEOPLE…. THIS IS A BLOG… A FORM OF COMMUNICATION IN AND OF ITSELF…

DON’T BE SHY… LEAVE A COMMENT!

I WILL RESPOND, AND THEN YOU WILL BE FAMOUS!

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OK… At this point it’s all about the left overs. What can I, or have I done, with 12 pounds of Turkey (carcass included) leftovers? It was a 13 pound Turkey and we each ate about 1/2 pound between dinner and snacking.

The first thing I did that very night was make turkey stock. I knew I was going to make some kind of soup, I just hadn’t decided on which kind. So, obsessive/compulsive as this seems, I made Turkey Stock the night of Thanksgiving. It really isn’t as bad as it sounds because we were done with dinner hours before usual (I was able to start so much earlier on a non-work day), it was just us, and it was so easy… I just threw everything into a pot, including all the stuff I stuffed inside, covered it with water and simmered for a couple - few hours. Before bed, I strained, covered, and put in the fridge.

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