Introduction

Hello and welcome to my virtual kitchen!

This first post is just to introduce me and my culinary viewpoint. So, here goes. As you can deduce, either from the name of this blog or because you know me in real life, my name is Emma and I'm a vegetarian. Specifically, I'm a lacto-ovo-vegetarian which means that I don't eat meat (obviously) or seafood, but I do eat eggs and dairy.

I graduated with my M.A. in Museum Studies, but the current museum job market is more competitive than the Hunger Games, so I'm living at home with my mom and grandma and working part-time while I wait for my adult life to really begin. In the meantime, I decided I needed to learn how to cook to keep myself from starving when I do eventually move out on my own. I'm kidding. I do know how to cook for the most part, but I am still a novice. Basically, I can follow a recipe and make a decent meal, but I have zero knife skills, so it takes me about twenty minutes to dice an onion.

To become a better cook and to satisfy my dietary preferences, I decided to pick out interesting recipes from my numerous vegetarian cookbooks and learn how to make them, using myself and my family as the guinea pigs. I'm also taking some of my family's favorite recipes (making them meat-free when necessary) and learning to make those too, for good measure. Over the past year or so, I've been slowly working towards this goal and posting the obligatory food porn pictures on Facebook. Then I had the idea recently to just blog about my culinary journey. I'm going to share the ups and downs of my experience, give you the recipes I use and how it actually was putting it together, and a review of the final product. I will also shamelessly share pictures of my adorable pets.

My ulterior motive for this blog is to show that vegetarian food is both interesting and delicious. For the record, lest you be scared that I'm also going to spew anti-meat rhetoric, I'm not. I don't care if you're a vegetarian or not; it's none of my business. I have a 'live and let live' attitude. I'm not going to belittle meat-eaters and I expect the same in return, so mean anti-vegetarian comments will not be tolerated.

So, whether you are a vegetarian, someone cooking for a vegetarian, trying to reduce your meat-intake for health reasons, or just a foodie looking for nice recipes, hopefully this blog will enlighten and inspire, and better my own culinary skills.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,
Emma

P.S. Here's the first of those adorable pet pictures: my cat Peanut.