Pascal's Plate

I love food. It's one of my many love languages. It makes me feel good when I'm with the people I love most, sharing a meal that makes us feel as full in our stomachs as our hearts do when we're together.

I was not much of a cook when I was younger. My pride and joy as far as experiments in the kitchen went was a slimy dessert I had concocted one summer: equal parts tapioca pudding and blue Kool-Aid Jello cups. I shredded the Jello into a bowl of tapioca pudding and combined 'til it was the color of mint toothpaste. Not sure what it would taste like now, but I loved it as a kid!

Eventually, I graduated to making muffins and cupcakes from packet and box mixes. I would bring cupcakes I baked and frosted myself throughout high school to my classmates. Of course, I only ever made 24 - and as you can guess, more than 24 people wanted my cupcakes and asked for one every time they saw me offering them.

When I learned how to make crepes for the first time, I loved it. I loved the mess of melting Toblerone (which is difficult when the Toblerone is crunchy - do they make smooth Toblerone?) and dipping strawberries in to my mixture like the whole process was revolutionary. I felt dignified, even when my crepes were colorless. There was no crispiness on those things!

Further into high school - around senior year - I really started coming into the kitchen, fueled by hunger.

I typically went the whole day without eating (never had time for breakfast and didn't get free lunch, so I never packed my own) so when I came home, the kitchen was my oyster. I vividly remember making ramen burgers as maybe a junior in high school - because we had ramen and we had ground beef and eggs and I didn't have my driver's license to grocery shop yet.

Boil and cook ramen, saving the flavor packet to the side

Whisk raw egg into ramen

Form ramen buns by portioning them into the bottom part of a bowl and flattening them

Fry up ramen buns in a pan

Make ground beef patties seasoned with aforementioned ramen packet

Serve with ketchup and fried egg and other toppings

They never turned out great appearance-wise, and I feel like they also didn't taste very good, but it was so much effort to make them that I had to eat them anyway.

I ran to simpler things - and I mean, way simpler things - after ramen burgers were a bust.

Look at the color on those crepes! That nas

Avocado grilled cheeses <3 (With mozarella!) (B side: Pizza grilled cheeses with pepperoni. Mmm.)

My favorite: yogurt bowls.

Cooking in college was basically non-existent, even when my fiance and I had a place of our own. Being a full-time student meant you were too exhausted to cook.

After college, in the last two years, I haven't been in the kitchen much. Every Christmas, I whip up a toffee-chocolate trifle: box chocolate cake on the bottom, instant chocolate pudding on top, thawed whipped topping on top of that, then crumbled-up-on-the-floor-with-the-handle-of-a-chef-knife pieces of Heath on top. Then you did that one more to make a really gorgeous trifle.

Now, the fiance and I have our own big-girl-and-boy place, and I treated myself with a set of really beautiful cookware, sturdy utensils, trusty appliances, and a multitude of mismatched plates and bowls. Every time I go into my kitchen, I'm greeted by the ceramic butt of a bunny as the lid to my empty cookie jar. I also have a pretty, partly droopy bouquet of blooming roses and peonies (?) in a cheap IKEA vase. I'm excited to have my own space to cook, and time to cook, thanks (but also, no thanks) to the pandemic.

It's going to be messy, delicious, and rewarding.

Follow along as I share some of my recipes. There'll be shortcuts, recipes I stole and made my own, recipes I straight-up saw somewhere else (I'll always share the link to the original!), and absolutely (possibly?) no ramen burgers that fall apart and are crunchy in all the wrong places. From time to time, my fiance will share some of his mastermind recipes, too!

Welcome to Pascal's Plate.