I have a beef with the modern food blog.  Sure, close-up photography and other bling-bling make great advertising, but I’m not looking to be sold on how beautiful and perfect X-recipe is.  Nor do I care about the quirks and warm fuzzy stories of kitchen celebrities.  If I read a food blog, I read to learn.  Tell me about the techniques— how you slice, how you knead, or how you fry.  Tell me why you paired these ingredients together.  Tell me about the history of the dish.  Don’t just blather on ad nauseum about how effortlessly flawless your food is and point to your pictures of glossy sliced tomatoes and stacked chocolate chip cookies (read: works of art).  I don’t care and I don’t believe you.  I’m a product of the age of skepticism, deconstructionism and postmodernism: trust not what they say, but ask why they are saying and doing.

I write with the same intent I have when I read.   I’m not here to sell you a happy story or photograph.  This blog didn’t even start as a blog but as a convenient sort of “notebook” on my local hard drive; I needed a way to organize my recipes and record my observations.  If I make a mistake in the kitchen, I can mercilessly criticize and examine the problem.  Dozens of posts later, when I decide to remake a dish-gone-wrong, I have my own personal history lesson to look back on and I can compensate accordingly.

My husband egged me on and eventually convinced me to publish to the Internets.

If Creative Comestibles happens to be useful to a wider audience, wonderful.  But being a teacher was never my original intent.  I relish being a perpetual student of the kitchen, and my motivations for writing are deliciously selfish.