Hello :)

My weakness is my sweet tooth. At least once a week I am dreaming of doughnuts or cupcakes... thinking of some freshly baked cookies still warm from the oven. I basically could live off of anything sweet… cakes, pies, muffins, cookie bars, ice cream- you name it, I want it. But then there are those days when I crave a perfectly seared tender steak with garlic mashed potatoes and some freshly baked garlic bread that is effortlessly crispy on the outside and pillowy soft on the inside.

Are you hungry yet? Because I am... as usual.

Baking and cooking isn’t something that I do simply because I have love for food, I also feel like it runs in my blood to be in the kitchen. My fondest memories of my Grandmother are spent enclosed by the comforting aromas of food in her kitchen and around her table. Growing up in a Greek household, my family always ate together, surrounded by homemade food and conversations about our day. I love trying out family recipes that my grandmother takes from her huge Greek cookbook that is falling apart and the pages are stained with time but I also love trying out recipes I find online like from Pintrest, other food blogs, or Food Network stars. I love combining two or three recipes and making an entirely new creations and that has to be one of my favorite parts of making food. You get to create something new every single time you step into your kitchen.

Now that I am older, married, and no longer living in my hometown minutes away from my family, I find that I feel closest to my family in the kitchen. If I am feeling homesick and craving one of my Mom’s go to recipes she used to make me and my sisters during our school week, I’ll bust out her makaronia me kima (spaghetti and meat sauce) and I feel like a part of my family is home with me. I am also finally starting to understand why my Grandmother loves to feed people. If you’ve ever seen a Greek movie (like My Big Fat Greek Wedding) or know someone who is Greek, chances are they’ve tried to feed you or have sent you home with food. I never understood it while I was growing up and always assumed my grandmother was trying to make me and my sisters fat but now I get it. Feeding people genuinely makes me happy. There is nothing I love more than sharing my food with someone I care about.

When my husband and I moved out of state away from both of our families my cooking went into high gear. Every day I was in the kitchen trying to make being so far away from our families as comforting as it could be. When we moved back to our home state, we were lucky enough to live with my husband’s best friend while we waited to move back into our home. We lived with him during the holidays- where I happily went into full holiday mode. I can still remember staying up into the late hours on Christmas Eve, with my husband and his best friend fast asleep on the couch while I finishing up baking and packaging cookies for everyone to take to their family dinners for Christmas night. There was no going back after that.

Luckily, my husband’s family lives close to us and we normally do a family potluck at least once a month. It gives me, my husband, and my sister in-law and her husband the perfect opportunity to try out new recipes and gain some skills in the kitchen. I can honestly say nothing makes me happier than feeding my husband’s family and them actually enjoying the food I make.

Now, that’s not saying that everything I make is amazing. Part of cooking and especially baking is learning from your mistakes and adjusting accordingly for the future.

Which leads me to this blog… Lately I’ve found being in the kitchen therapeutic and I feel like I have a ginormous list of recipes I want to try and not enough weekends to experiment every one of them. So, I am challenging myself to make one recipe a day for an entire year.

You heard it. 365 days of something from my kitchen. Does this sound familiar? If you’ve seen the movie Julie & Julia then you have a perfect picture of what I am trying to attempt. The recipes could be as small as a new overnight oats recipe or something as intricate as making freshly baked pasta stuffed with deliciousness. I am taking this year to explore recipes from my Greek roots, to my husband’s Cuban roots, I’m taking requests, and just channeling my inner cravings with whatever pops up on my social media feed.

Luckily, I have my husband’s family close, my husband’s best friend 18 houses down from our house, and work, so there will be enough food distribution to where we hopefully don’t eat everything ourselves.

Time to get cooking J