Last post - November 14?!?

Okay, so I haven't posted in a long, long time. I'm sorry. I'm a bad food blogger. Also, I haven't taken a single food picture in months. Months!

I have been cooking, though, at least a little. More on that in a moment...

So, why the hiatus? Besides rest being good for the soul and all that, life has intervened. For one thing, I decided to move in with my guy, and we spent a month looking for affordable apartments in the Boston area (always fun), then we spent a month packing and moving (made far more complicated by the fact that we rented a "fixer-upper" that we had to clean and paint ourselves to make habitable), then we spent a month unpacking. In fact, we've spent six weeks unpacking, and we're still at it. I've decided that I'm never moving again. I'm going to grow old and grey in this apartment - which is becoming quite lovely, now that the walls are painted, the floors washed and the rabbit turds swept up. (Not kidding at all - the former tenant had free-roamin' and poopin' rabbits.)

While all this was going on, I was taking a college biology course and studying for and taking the GREs, all in preparation for an application to this program: the Master's Program in Food, Agriculture and Environment at Tuft's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. Biology was hellishly hard (I'm a humanities girl all the way and took Rocks for Jocks in college to fulfill my science requirement), and I can't tell you how pathetic I felt practicing my algebra for the GREs. I was pretty certain algebra and I had parted ways forever back in my teens, and I did not appreciate the return of hated math mid-life. But I survived bio and math both, and I received my acceptance to the program this weekend. Three cheers! I hope that this education will allow me to make some difference in our food system. We'll see.

With all of that going on, I hadn't actually been cooking very much until the last couple weeks. It's hard to cook when all your pots and knives are in boxes. But the kitchen is set up now, and I have some free time again, so I've been back at the stove. Nothing spectacular, nothing unusual. In fact, I've been relying heavily on some tried-and-true favorites - tequila shrimp, steak salad, plain roasts, pumpkin lasagne, chocolate chip cookies, stuffed potatoes, glazed carrots. I'm also learning to cook for someone with Crohn's disease, which involves some significant limitations - not too much fiber or too many raw vegetables, no beans, no broccoli, no fruit/berries with seeds, no coffee, no chili peppers, and so on. The only experiment I've done in months was a chocolate steamed pudding that somehow came out dry. How could something cooked in steam come out dry? I ask you. That's what time away from the kitchen will do to you - you lose your touch. But I'm back. And I'm going to be posting. Really.