Wow, I'd forgotten what real food tasted like

I used to cook a lot, and though it wasn't always fancy, it was tasty. Then one thing led to another, and I had more money than time (instead of, well, less money), and convenience so-called foods came into my life. That was far more years ago than I care to recall.

Then, well, my boyfriend and I moved in together in August 2010, into a house with a proper kitchen, and Nigel started to cook stuff on the barbecue we bought. I was recovering from a torn rotator cuff at the time, so a lot of normal things hurt, and that made it harder to cook.

Well, Nigel discovered he was really enjoying cooking, and we've been making more and more food from scratch in the past six months. We've bought a bunch of cookbooks we didn't already own, read blog articles, watched some nifty shows about food, and most of all, cooked more.

I'm finally starting to feel better, and as we get into a routine, I'm slowly finding my interest in cooking and food returning. I love to bake, always have, and we're making our own treats now and both of us are loving it. We're getting spoiled by how good everything tastes, and we've noticed a couple of interesting side effects of all this cooking real food at home. We hardly ever eat out or order in anymore, and when we do, we find the food often is overpriced, oversalted, and overly heavy. We're also a lot harder to impress.

Nigel's approach to food and cooking has been inspiring to me, as he's taken a totally different tack on it than I'm used to. I'm used to looking at recipes and cookbooks and deciding what I want to make based on ingredients at hand. Nigel? He's been going online a lot and looking for "how do I make this food I want to eat?" recipes. He's tackled stuff I never would have thought to make, and he's had a lot of successes. He also has more patience with his failures than I historically have had.

We're looking forward to sharing the nifty stuff we're cooking and eating now, and if we get someone else drooling and interested in making tasty food, that's great too!