About…

Us… We love to cook and we especially love to cook together.  We realized this a few months into our relationship when we made our first dinner for friends.  Pesto.  We had no recipe.  We just had the basic principles of pesto and our taste buds to guide us.  Our friends liked the meal (at least they were gracious enough to let us believe that they did) and we liked the process just as much as the product.

Since then, our meals have become a little more complicated.  We have spent time both following recipes and making up our own.  Sometimes we bite off more than we can chew and make three side-dishes on a random Monday or a whole roasted chicken for only one meat-eating guest.  Luckily, we love leftovers.

We dream of owning a restaurant and publishing a cookbook.  In the meantime, we aren’t quitting our day jobs.  We started this blog as a record keeper of our adventures in the kitchen.  Even if we never open a restaurant, at least we will have some recipes written down for the grandkids.

Amanda… teaches high school English when not in the kitchen.  Her freshmen keep her on her toes and she is lucky in that she loves to go to work everyday.  This blog was conceived, not-so-coincidentally, on what happened to be the second day of her summer vacation.

She is a vegetarian and has been for the last 12 years.  She loves cooking meat for and with Zach.  She no longer has to worry that he’s being nice when he says he likes the meat she cooked (is it under/over salted?  can he taste the lemon?  was lemon even a good choice?).  Now everything they make, meat or not, ends with the phrase, “When we serve this at our restaurant we will…”

She loves chocolate and avocadoes, corn and chickpeas, hearty tomato sauces and medium to full bodied red wines, along with the occasional West Coast Pinot.  She has recently discovered artichoke hearts, cotijo cheese and fried eggs on absolutely everything.  She loves the way her apartment smells when they cook.  She also loves when the neighbors knock on the door and tell them that they’ve made the hallway smell good.  She loves Zach, too, obviously.

Zach… grew up wanting to be a rock star (who didn’t?) and is now the director of marketing and web development at a small for-profit company.  He has learned by doing and loves it.  When not cooking or working he does freelance work with audio and film, and dreams up personal projects like horror movies set during their annual trip to the Poconos with friends.  He has a wild imagination which helps both at work and in the kitchen.

He is a New Yorker, but still has his Oregon license.  He got paid to cook dinners for his family as a kid.  He continued to cook dinners, this time pro bono, for his housemates in college and roommates in New York.  Now he loves to cook with Amanda and dreams of the days when they have a bigger apartment and a bigger kitchen.

Zach loves hamburgers and experimenting with new recipes.  He salivates thinking about steak and potatoes, especially, but not only homemade ones, fried up in his aging wok that he doesn’t want to get rid of. He has a not-so-secret obsession with mortadella sandwiches, a soft spot for gouda cheese, and will never turn down a bowl of popcorn. He’ll even share some with Amanda, and if that’s not love, he’s not sure what is.