A danish perspective..

When Katie told me she was creating this blog, I was overly excited! This is something that I have wanted to do be part of for some time.. My name is Stephanie, I am the mother of a two year old boy and the wife of a American husband with Sicilian roots, so lasagna is a big deal in our house. I came to this country almost 2 years ago from Denmark, a place that has a very different food culture than the US.

My relationship with American food is diverse, I love it, loathe it, am in awe at how courageous people are with experimenting with cooking and simultaneously disgusted at what I call the american way of assembling a meal from ready made products (Chili does not come out of a can - it comes out of a very yummy and delicious smelling pot on the stove..) I will contribute here with my take on some classic American dishes, my love for VERY spicy food - especially Thai inspired stuff, and with some low-fat versions of well-know dishes. I love hearing what people have done with my recipes and where improvements can be made!

Velbekomme!

- Stephanie

Welcome to Dishcraft!

Hello!

I am Katie, a 29 year old, married (it'll be 4 years tomorrow!) mother of 2 toddlers living in the greater Los Angeles area of Sunny Southern California. I have a 3 year old daughter and a son who will be 2 in just as many weeks. I love to cook, I don't love the clean-up, but I love the consumption. Gathering around the kitchen table for a meal has been something I've done with my family since before I could remember. Both of my grandmothers are amazing cooks (no matter how much my grandma now says she hates to cook) I vividly remember eating their meals as a kid (even my grandpa's delicious green beans made with bacon, YUM). I learned a ton from watching my mother cook, I do credit her with being the reason I realize the importance of home cooked meals, and now I enjoy cooking for my family. I prefer to know where the food going into the bellies of the ones I love most, came from. Don't we all?

I've been working on my own "cookbook" on Tastebook.com for the last 6 months or so. I say cookbook in quotes because I am not a creator of recipes, what I'm doing, is taking pictures of my meals and putting all of the recipes and photos, both ones I inherited from my grandmothers or my aunt, ones I've acquired over the years, and ones out of my many cookbooks. To make my life easier, I am putting every recipe I love and frequently use, into one cookbook, which should make my cooking life easier. I plan to pass my book down to my daughter in the future. I thought it would be fun for her to have all the recipes I made for our family as she was growing up. And so, I decided to name my "cookbook" Dishcraft. I've searched Amazon, there is no other cookbook out there called Dishcraft, so this is an original name for a cooking blog/recipe place, and I'm darn proud of it! There is a Dishcraft blog without the "its" in front of it, but it's dormant. Yay. Hope it stays that way. So that's the story behind the name.

So anyway, a few weeks ago I was asked to be a contributing writer of a cooking blog that another wonderful friend of mine put together and I thought that the idea of having multiple contributors was a great idea. I am not a talented enough chef to pull off a cooking blog on my own. I have run a message board, of wives and moms, most of whom love to cook, for the last year and a half, and we are always sharing recipes and meal ideas, asking for recipes and things to bring to a party, so I decided to put this blog together with a few of my lovely girlfriends who are scattered around the country and happen to not only be wonderful people, but have wonderful taste in food! Here, we will share recipes for anything and everything relating to the kitchen. From food to gadgets, anything that makes our lives as culinary goddesses as easy as possible.

Happy cooking!