Life is to short to eat crappy food!

A friend of mine once told me "life is to short to eat crappy food", and I must say I completely agree with him.  I am constantly amazed at how often we as society eat things that are just down right disgusting.  We make attempts to justify the crap we eat and make ourselves feel better by saying it was cheap or it was fast or...?  But it does not matter, it is still crappy food and often not very good for us.

I wonder, are we as society just apathetic when it comes to what we eat, have we been socialized in to thinking certain foods are good or good for us, or are we just down right lazy and unwilling to either make or eat things that are good?  My guess is that it is a mix of the three.  From my research the general decline in food and the acceptance of crappy food started with the commercial brain washing of the 1950, 60s and 70s.  Do you remember when margarine came with a packet of nuclear yellow dye?  It was sold to us that this was the way of the future.  I also loved the push for "TV Dinners" that were definitely a ploy to get us to spend more time out of the kitchen and in front of the television watching mindless entertainment and making ourselves fat.  When you honestly think about it, none of these prepackaged food back then were good and they surely were not good for us. But we as society were hoodwinked by marketing and the commercialization of "the future" to start eating crappy food.

Today, I believe that too many people have forgotten or never learned how to cook.  Basic kitchen and cooking techniques are not being learned in the home.  Most recipes, if you can call them that, call for a can of this or a box of that as the main ingredient.  Just as we need to refocus on the family and fix that basic building block, we need to fix what it is we eat and serve in our homes.  People need to really consider what it is they are eating. 

Over the years I have developed a love of eating and in turn cooking, baking and candy making.  Through this blog I hope to share with you some of my successes and failures I have with the places I eat at and the things I make.  I also hope I can convince you of a simple fact that it is not hard or expensive to eat and cook good food.

Please note, I am not a tree hugging soil munching druid so I will shop at stores other than Whole Foods (though I love Whole Foods), and yes, I will eat meat with the best of them.  I also have one general snobby rule in my kitchen, it states that if the recipe calls for a can of Campbells anything to be mixed in, that recipe is forthwith given a burning at the stake that would make the Salem witch hunts jealous.

I hope you enjoy my random posts and find my recipes fun to make.  Please feel free to comment on the recipes with your variations.  Just so you know, all of my recipes are tailored for an elevation of ~1370 meters (4500 feet) above sea level and for a very low humidity climate.  I only use a natural gas range and the oven is NON convection so if your oven is electric, convection, or both, your baking times will be different.