Hello and welcome to my food blog – Apples To Zucchinis – where we venture into cooking with ingredients from A to Z. I’ll show you what I cook and encourage you to take up cooking! So you may ask: “Yet another food blog!?” Aren’t there enough of them? Well, I think my food blog is different. Let me explain. Just three years ago I left home to go to university. I was excited and thrilled. It was the next big step in my life! What hadn’t occurred to me at that instant was that I was leaving behind all those fabulous home-cooked meals that I guess I largely took for granted. The meals would just seem to appear at supper time and my sisters and I would eat. I did help in the kitchen from time to time, but the precise mechanics, process, planning, science, and, yes, the art, of combining ingredients, often simple, but at times complex, remained something of a mystery to me. When presented with the finished product, it can be intimidating, discouraging, and not at all obvious how we got there.
Well, fast forward three years. I am in my third year of university and I am now cooking meals that are healthy, nutritious, inexpensive, beautiful, and, most of all, delicious! And, I want to convince you that you can do it too! It’s definitely worth it. I am here to tell you, don’t be intimidated or discouraged. I did it and so can you!
My bog isn’t exactly a course in how to cook, neither is it just a list of recipes nor is it part of a big corporate push to get you to buy something. It’s basically pictures of the food I cook. My pics are not photoshopped or post-production enhanced. It’s the real deal taken with my phone. What you see if what you get. After all, you’re not eating the photograph! If you are interested in knowing the recipe or how to cook something you like the look of, please email me and I will send out the recipe. If there is a great deal of demand, I will post the recipe and instructions on the site. Basically, I want to encourage students to learn to cook; it’s not as hard as you think and most of all, I want to encourage a healthy lifestyle.
Some of the things I do are: I make my own broth, turkey, chicken, and beef; I bake my own bread in a cast-iron Dutch oven; and, I make my own pasta when I have time.
I prefer to cook in cast iron. It’s easy to maintain, it retains and distributes heat evenly, and lasts practically forever with proper care.
The A2Z of cooking means that I cook with all kinds of meat, all manner of vegetables and fruits. And don’t forget about spices! Spices are the best way to elevate the taste of your food from boring and bland to tasty and tremendous! You won’t need to go to a restaurant to have a restaurant-quality meal, or better!
When I invite guests over, I often get them to participate in the process of getting the meal ready, and believe it or not, most people really enjoy watching a meal come together. It’s like watching a cool puzzle being solved. Socializing around food, and in particular, the making of delicious food is magical.
The key is practice, perseverance, and passion. The first two beget the latter. The trick is to keep trying and before you know it, you’ll impress your dinner guests with fantastic meals that taste great and which are simple to prepare.
What is my target audience? It’s students, away from home, that tend to eat out too much, eat fast food as a staple, or are afraid to go off campus and are psychologically bound to student-style cafeteria food. You can do much better. Be healthier and lose weight at the same time. Most restaurant food contains far too much sodium, far too much fat and oil, and far too much sugar to be good for you. Prepared foods have too many preservatives that are necessary to turn food that would normally rot, go off, or get moldy into everlasting shelf-stable immortal consumables. Budget? If you are on a budget, financial, not time, then buying food is the cheapest way to feed yourself.
MSW