I first put some recipes on the web in about 1997. In that year, I created and maintained a website (and server) for students of organic chemistry teaching labs. I tucked a personal website on the same server, and then uploaded my favorite recipes. It wasn’t a true blog – but that’s only because the word blog was not coined until 1999.

I still like the content of my first website, so I am going to pull it into this current WordPress blog. Below is my old site introduction. Hey, I haven’t changed much!

Date written: circa 1997
I have been collecting and cataloguing recipes for many, many years. The Net allows me to share them with all you Web Crawlers looking for something new to cook!

[I then listed my recipe categories in this order: cookies, desserts, yeast breads, muffins, quick breads, main dishes]

Think the order’s backwards? I don’t. That’s part of my philosophy of cooking: always think of dessert first. You just eat the rest so you can eat dessert, anyway. Which brings us to …

My Philosophy of Cooking

Each person develops their own cooking “style”. Many factors determine how you cook: what you like, what your spouse likes, what your kids like, how weight-conscious you are, what part of the world you are from, how your family cooked while you were young, how much a part of your life food is, how much you like to cook, whether or not you like to follow recipes to a “t”, how much you like to experiment . . . on and on. Each cook has a unique cooking personality. It follows that each person’s recipe collection reflects their cooking personality.

My cooking personality? I began cooking only desiring to bake cookies, cakes, and pies. But, the old family metabolism kicked in, and I had to watch those calories. So, I began baking breads. Since I liked to cook but couldn’t survive on dessert and bread alone, I looked to main dishes. I enjoy spending time in the kitchen, pots a-bubbling and bread a-baking, so some of my recipes take a lot of time. But, some don’t, since I work full time, and refuse to eat food from a fast food restaurant or a package. You won’t find any vegetable or salad recipes in my collections, because we like our vegetables as close to raw as possible, untainted by cooking or heavy dressings. We eat a salad each night with dinner, consisting of a variety of lettuces and raw vegetables. Cooked vegetables? Steamed lightly, only, with a sprinkling of almonds or lemon, perhaps. Soups? I just throw anything I feel like into the pot, rarely following a recipe. Traveling through the late sixties and the seventies, I picked up many ideas from natural, “health food” cooking. These ideas tamed down a bit with the years, trading health food ideas for what my family would actually eat, and then expanding to include the low-fat nutrition ideas which are currently so popular.

My collection includes only recipes that I really like and that I make frequently. I didn’t just gather the recipes from cookbooks and throw them into a database: it’s a very personal collection. Each recipe is prepared several times and modified if necessary before I deem it good enough to be made a permanent part of my collection.

I hope that a few of my recipes will overlap with your own cooking personality and that you will enjoy them as much as I do!

…Never Trust a Skinny Cook….