Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

This weekend marks our seventh wedding anniversary and I thought I’d share a few reflections of the past seven years. Here is one: Getting married for the first time at age 36 was rather a challenge in the cooking department. Cooking for one is much, much different than cooking for two; especially when the one you are marrying happens to be used to all kinds of homemade stuff; like potato salad and devilled eggs and desserts galore. In the 3 month time span between saying “Yes, I will” and “I do” there were hours of panicked ransacking of the internet to find recipes that I could maybe attempt. I was dismayed to find out one of his favorite desserts is strawberry gelatin with bananas. As far as I am concerned gelatin is something that ought not to have been invented. The texture is just nasty. But, always game for a challenge, I bought up a couple boxes of the stuff to try my luck at it. To start off with I discovered I’d forgotten bananas, but I was determined to go thro...

This was going to be just one post, but I got bogged down with trying to tell everything all on one page, so I am going to make several posts out of my cooking stories. Here is the beginning: When you are 36 and have been a never-married bachelorette for so long, you don’t really prepare the meals, they just kind of happen; soups, sandwiches, fruit, cereal and milk…etc. I rarely ever ate out, but at the same time I didn’t ever see the point of preparing full meals for myself either. Sometimes I would fix a casserole and freeze most of it to be taken for lunches at work, but for the most part I didn’t bother much in the cooking department. Also, for much of the 12 years I was in Portland, OR I didn’t live where I had access to my own kitchen, I either had to share with a bunch of others, or I only had a microwave and a stove top burner. So when I got married back in the fall of ’04 I was pretty green in cooking to please myself, let alone someone else. I had visited my future in-la...