ksduffster

about me

I am a relatively recent transplant from Ohio to the West Coast, where I work as an assistant at an intellecutal property law firm. I love to cook and experiment in the kitchen. I'm not much of baker, though, since I hate to measure my ingredients. Like most everyone else these days, I am always on the lookout for low-calorie recipes. I live with my boyfriend of a year and I try to cook dinner for us at least 6 times a week, which he heartily supports. When I'm not cooking or browsing through cookbooks from the library or second-hand store, I can usually be found knitting something, playing video games with my BF, or just watching tv. I will be returning to school shortly to become a paralegal, so the cooking may fall off a bit, but hopefully I will still be able to find time to cook up some of the delicious-looking recipes I am bound to find here!

As I have become more familiar with the site, I have been reviewing recipes and refining my reviewing style. At the beginning, I was giving everything I liked 5 stars. Eventually I came to realise that, if you give everything 5 stars, you may as well not review anything at all because eventually it won't mean anything. Thus, I have developed my reviewing guidelines which I lay out below:

*****: This is a FABULOUS recipe that goes directly into the rotation (the rotation being the select group of recipes that DBF and I enjoy so much that I make them quite often); generally, these recipes are slightly (or completely) out of the ordinary or a twist on a classic. For desserts, (which DBF and I don't eat as often so I take them into work to share for potlucks and such), 5 stars means that I brought home an empty plate and people were asking for the recipe.

****: This is a very good recipe that I will make again at some point but did not bowl us over enough to make it into the rotation. I also use this for "special occassion recipes"- recipes that we think are ab-fab but cost a lot either in money, time, or calories, and are thusly only made for special times.

***: This is a recipe that we didn't find overly impressive, but which was not awful either- one of those recipes where you kind of just shrug your shoulders and say "it wasn't bad". I may or may not make it again. If I do make it again, I will likely change something (usually spices) to make it more appealing to our tastes.

**: We didn't like this, but we ate it. I am vrey unlikely to make it again. Sometimes it is because the flavors didn't mesh in a way we liked; other times it is because we found it unbearably bland. If it is an identifiable problem, I will say what our problem was in my review. If I can't tell what the problem is, I will just try to describe what exactly we didn't like.

*: We had to throw this out. I HATE wasting food (and, by extension, money), so if I had to throw out dinner because we found it inedible, it will be reflected in my review. I don't choose recipes with unknown ingredients or major ingredients that we do not like. Between DBF and myself, pretty much anything will get eaten. If we can't find a way to power through a meal then, I'm really sorry, but I can't give you more than one star. Again, if the problem is known, I will mention it in the review along with possible fixes for the future.

One more thing about reviews: My reviews are very detailed. I will tell you what I liked, what I didn't like, what I omitted, what I added, what I subbed and ideas for future renditions of the dish. I appreciate some level of the same in return (one of my zaar pet peeves is people who only give stars but no comments. This is not helpful to me. Even if you followed the directions word-for-word, TELL ME ABOUT IT!)

My other zaar pet peeve is people who post recipes that they have never tried. If you can't vouch for the quality of your dish, why should I try it? I appreciate the fact that there are folks who are not premium members and do not have private cookbooks in which to store these recipes so for them it is necessary to post recipes they wish to hold on to without previously having made the dish. That doesn't change the fact that it bothers me to no end. In light of this, all of the recipes in my public cookbook have been kitchen tested by me. If I haven't used the recipe as written, eaten the food and found it enjoyable, you will not see my name attached to the recipe.



"My motivation to cook is that I'm always hungry." -Jacques Pepin

Favorite Foods:

My absolute comfort food is my grandma's potpie, known to most Americans as chicken and dumplings. I don't make it very often because the dumplings are made from scratch, so it is quite time-consuming, but it is so good on a cold Sunday afternoon. I am also a big fan of pierogies, cabbage rolls, and chicken paprikash (we're eastern european, can you tell? ) as well as any type of starch imaginable. You name it, pasta, potatoes, rice, I will eat it. And lots of it. So far I have no recipe of my own where people say, "Oh remember that _____ she made? It was so good." All I have are a couple recipes I stole from other members of my family, including the aforementioned potpie, my aunt's sausage dressing recipe, and a pie recipe my mom stole from a Jell-o box about 20 years ago. When I am not in the kitchen, my BF and I usually turn to one of the local restaurants here, a Mexican place a couple yards from our apartment. During the winter, though, we will often drive to San Francisco for some fresh crab legs or we will go to a pho or ramen restaurant for a steaming hot bowl of noodles.

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