Beginnings

Hello Lord Jeff Cooks!

No recipe for you today, I'm sorry, as I've been cut-off from a kitchen during my thesis travels.  I've also been eating many various spicy, mushy, curry, creamy things whose names and ingredients I cannot hope to begin to identify for you; I remember my friends and I being reduced to calling them "The Orange One with the Chick Peas" or "The Green One with the Paneer" or "The Yellow One with the Weird Chunky Stuff" etc. etc.

Subsequently, I found myself on smittenkitchen.com this morning (quite possibly my favorite food website, both for the fantastic photos and the incredible recipes; it is the origin of the to-die-for Thanksgiving Sweet Potatoes!) drooling -- almost literally -- over various yummy recipes.  Pizza with Bacon, Onions and Cream.  Skirt Steak Salad with Blue Cheese.  Raspberry Brown Sugar Gratin.  Blue Cheese and Red Potato Tart.  Vanilla Roasted Pears.  To name a few.  I think I finally stopped somewhere around page 35; my bookmark button was exhausted.

At one point I ran into a recipe for an apple scone, which got me to thinking about these incredible apple scones I made when I was probably about 14 (I think it was the summer before I started high school.)  And then I got sad because I realized that while those scones were seriously good, I have no idea where the recipe was from or where it's gone.  And this got me to thinking about how I started cooking -- baking, actually, the cooking came later -- in the first place.  And finally, it made me want to know everyone else's stories.

So how about it, Lord Jeffsters?  And blog-readers!! When did the cooking bug bite you?  Did you have a gateway recipe?  Was it that semester where the choices were cook or starve?  Was it a parent or a friend?  Tell us your story!

(Mine continues after the jump)

I grew up in a cooking family; my mother is a wonderful cook, one uncle owned his own restaurant, and a third (who lived in New York) seemed, to me, to be the most outrageously talented chef imaginable.  I remember one night this second uncle had come to visit us and he and my mother took over the kitchen.  They called themselves the Two Green Peppers, or something close to that, copycatting the then-popular cooking show The Too Hot Tamales.

I've always found it a little odd, then, that my love of the kitchen sprouted not from being with family but actually from solitude.  The Easy Bake Oven I got for Christmas as a little girl probably planted the seed, but everything flourished that one summer.  I was home alone a lot; my sister was at a summer camp or something like that, Dad was at work, Mom was always busy, and I was left at home to my own devices.  Bored, and often craving a baked good, I decided to start going on the internet to find baking recipes I thought sounded good.  Because the baking supplies in my kitchen were a tad limited, this was also the summer I learned how to experiment with my baking.  I made the apple scones, various cookies, a cake that I remember tasted ok, not great.  This was also the summer I discovered my signature top-secret gingerbread molasses cookie recipe.  Since then, I've always loved to bake and, as I got older, cook.

So that's my story.  What's yours?