[food post]

I just got Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything for Christmas and I love it. I don't know how many recipes in there I will actually wind up trying,but I have already tried one(chocolate chip cookies) and they came out really well.

For me, it's about trying new stuff-I have a lot of things that I cook that are favourites of the family(Shepherd's pie is one of them-and my mom's  chicken tortilla casserole which I have started making among others.)

Bittman's book is good because there are not a lot of steps in a lot of the recipes(for people who  are more visual, there is a iPhone/iPad version of How To Cook Everything!) I'm glad that that exists.

Something you might not know about me:I am an experimenter. Yes, I do like recipes and recipe books, but I sometimes like to get in the kitchen and throw a bunch of ingredients together. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

When I was first learning how to cook, I did a lot of that. My mom was trying to be nice so she held back her feelings about some things(though I remember one dish that I made that had too much cumin in it. *that* I can't blame her  for not wanting to eat it.Even I didn't want to eat it, and I love my own cooking.

 One of the first things I learned how to cook was grilled cheese sandwiches, and whilst I make an amazing grilled cheese now,I had to burn a lot of them before I got  good at it(my mom used to burn grilled cheese sandwiches when I was a kid-she would have to scrape all of the burnt parts off. So it's not just me!)