Welcome to the OCD Kitchen!

Hi all,

I have decided to start a blog about my exploits in the kitchen- if anything to get a certain wife I know to stop hounding me about it. Seriously, though- I love to cook. I even like going to the grocery store to buy ingredients.

With that said, I plan to make this all about recipes I love to make and tweak, appliances I use, and everything related to the kitchen. I call it the OCD Kitchen for two reasons- first, I tend to get on a kick for a certain type of food and make batch after batch of it with changes to get it "right". Most notably as of late have been ice cream and green chili- more on those things later. The second reason is that I tend to be a bit... ehem... unbearable to be in the kitchen with. I want everything done a certain way. Why not try to redirect these dubious personality traits (flaws?) into a blog?

A little history of my unprofessional cooking career:

Everyone in my family learned to cook while I was growing up. My mother enrolled me as the only boy in a 4H cooking an sewing group- yes, I got a hard time by my peers there. It was the first evidence of the OCD in my Kitchen however. The first recipe I did over and over again: orange julius. (I was hoping to find the recipe card I wrote out as a kid- but alas, I can't seem to find it.) Incidentally and as a side note, my patch work pillow got honorary mention at the local 4H fair... or whatever that was. That's right, big honors!

My first job at age 16 was working at El Pollo Asada- mexican food and grilled chicken. While it was certainly good, this was the sort of food you wouldn't want to see cold. We made everything from scratch there, and when stored in the fridge, the refried beans and taco meat had an inch thick layer of fat formed on top of the vat. We cut and flattened our whole chickens to be marinated in three large garbage cans that we wheeled around before we grilled and cut them to order with butcher knives.

If you dined at Kittredge or Farrand hall at the University of Colorado at Boulder circa '92-'95, chances are you had food that I helped prepare while I was in college. I suspect that I should keep this information to myself, as preparing food for 800 diners per meal for a span of 4 hours of "sit time" had just about everyone complaining, including myself. Nonetheless, I spent hours and hours cutting onions, mushrooms, preparing large vats of soup, cooking massive pizzas, etc etc etc. Nothing is as fantastic for a college student's complexion as not only eating the fatty food, but getting to stand over deep fryers for 3 hours preparing it. I figure you haven't lived until you have cleaned deep fat fryers. Good times!

At any rate, CU residence halls couldn't beat it out of me, so I hope I can share some of the things I have learned, swap recipes with people, and have a laugh!