About Me and Contact Information

I’m not a chef and I’ve never been to culinary school.  What I am is just a person who loves food and enjoys spending time in the kitchen.  I learned to cook when I was in my early teens from watching my mother and grandmother in the kitchen but i really got interested in cooking after seeing my uncle make his famous spaghetti.  Up to that point in my life, I never thought that a man could be the chef in the house but it was my uncle that made me realize that men can indeed share the kitchen duties (sorry, but Puerto Rican society was a bit sexist back then).

I was an independent and self-sufficient teen and I often found myself cooking my own dinner.  In my senior year in high school, I started making a sandwich for lunch and bringing it to school with me every day.  The word got out that I made a good sandwich and so I started selling them for $5 each, making enough money to pretty much do as I pleased.  Ever since then, I’ve enjoyed making people happy through food, even if it’s just my family and close friends.

I built this blog with two purposes: to better keep track of my recipes and to encourage me to cook things that I wasn’t already comfortable cooking.  I’ve found myself hunting through my memories trying to figure out what ingredients went in what recipes all too often and thought it would be nice to have an online repository for them.  My cooking style is eclectic and erratic and I often find myself just throwing ingredients into the pot as they come to me (more often then not without measuring them) and hoping that it tastes good.  Therefore, by having to write them down in order to post them, I’m hoping to keep them for future use and reference.

As for the second purpose, it’s all too easy to just fall in a rut and make the same dishes over and over.  Since I’m only going to post a dish once, I will be forced to cook at least a few dishes a week that I have not made before.  This will help me broaden my culinary mind and hopefully make my stomach happy in return.

I hope that my culinary journey inspires you to get in the kitchen, throw on an apron (not that I wear one), and start cooking adventurously; all you will require is an open mind and a healthy appetite.  I’ll leave you with two quotes that I hope will inspire all of us:

“If it looks good, eat it!” – Chef Andrew Zimmern
“Don’t be afraid, it’s your kitchen!” – Tom Pizzica

Contact: dembellyfull@gmail.com