Loving to cook and cooking for love . . .

I was listening to an interview with a chef and the question asked was what gave him his inspiration to invent and cook such interesting foods. He said that first and foremost, the main ingredient for success was . . . love!

I thought that was interesting because I know that I love to cook/bake but never fully realized that I do it because I love my family. I care about what they eat and the only way to control a good deal of their nutritional intake is to spend time in the kitchen cooking and baking.

Yes, we enjoy fast food on occasion but it is a treat. Many times, too, they say 'thank you' and venture that it would have tasted better done at home.

We've all heard it said that we raise our children as we want them to be as adults. If you don't raise them on a variety of foods and the necessity of actually eating one's vegetables, will they pass it on to their own families?

I knew a wife/mother who thought it was hilarious that she had married someone that came from a restaurant/gourmet background while she couldn't cook well. After their 25-plus years of marriage, I would have thought she'd have been past the amusement and learned to cook better instead of finding it funny that her husband didn't have really good meals.

Mothers who don't want to cook for whatever reason might take a moment to consider this: If your child or husband were in danger, would you rush to save them? Taking the time to to feed them healthily and properly goes along those lines, too.

Gluten-Free Success!

 Being relatively new to the gluten-free lifestyle, I'm still experimenting. I found a recipe on-line that looked interesting and contained no weird ingredients I'd have to go hunting for in order to accomplish the end result. As you can see from the picture, I managed to bake a reasonably presentable lemon cake with lemon curd filling. As we enjoyed our dessert, we suddenly realized that we had missed having cake and this one felt and tasted like cake . . . without the gluten.

Although we ventured into trying the gluten-free diet for the sake of interest, really, we have discovered that my husband has been having less digestive issues which leads us to believe he is one of the purported one in 133 that actually have some problems with celiac. In any event, he doesn't want to go back and as long as I am able to produce cakes like this, he sees no reason to venture back to the land of wheat and gluten.