Opening the Door...

Growing up with two working parents, I would come home after school to an empty house ravenously hungry. With a little digging around the fridge, some appropriation of left-overs, and a creative exploration of packaged foods, condiments, and the occasional fresh fruits and vegetables I created interesting, usually funny-looking late afternoon snacks. Due to a combination of laziness, fear of food-borne illnesses and my lack of familiarity with kitchen equipment I limited myself to pre-cooked meats, cheeses, sauces, and simple produce (nothing that required peeling).

My evolving portfolio of chicken nuggets with cheese and salsa, grilled cheese, toaster-oven garlic bread, cut fruits and sauteed hot-dogs kept me fed and led me to an interest in cooking. In college I explored the kitchen further - attempting complicated and strange dishes from various online and paper cookbooks as well as recipes from family and friends. While I built on my taste for unusual foods and flavors and experimented with unfamiliar combinations of ingredients I found myself returning to one guiding principle in most of my cooking endeavors - an appreciation for simplicity. I was drawn to simple recipes like those of Cooking for Engineers and Mark Bittman, the New York Times' Minimalist and I would return to them over and over.

Though my definition of 'simple' has changed over time, I remember fondly those days of pilfering the fridge and creating Macguyver-like solutions to my gnawing appetite using nothing but a microwave and a butter knife. In an attempt to re-live my past glories I present this homage to simplicity, a blog of my attempts to re-create and re-imagine the foods I ate as a latch-key kid.