Welcome to Amateur Italian Cooking

The purpose of this blog is to share my experiences as I learn how to cook Italian and other meals. I've never been much of a cook, preferring to eat out or make a TV dinner in lieu of actually cooking anything. As a result, before recently I've cooked very little. My repertoire which I would break out maybe twice a year at most included a poor man's lasagna, steak, hamburger helper, tacos and the rare "other" meal.

My wife on the other hand is an awesome cook and has treated me over the last few years to a wide variety of great food. Combined with wanting to give something back, make things a touch easier for her in her personal life and a growing interest in some forms of cooking (mostly country Italian), I've come to enjoy cooking a couple meals a week. I still hate some aspects of cooking and luckily for me, my wife enjoys being a sous chef, which makes it a lot easier for me to enjoy the aspects of cooking I do like.

The most amazing thing is though, that it turns out that when I do take the time to cook, it turns out that I am pretty good or at least I turn out some pretty good food. Understand that while I don't cook for too many people outside of my immediate family, my family is not the type to save your feelings and tell you something false - including on whether dinner was "alright", "really good" or "please don't make this again".

The better cook between us, my wife maintains a blog of her own that features a lot of great recipes and can be found at hearthwitch.com or from the link over to the right. Some of my recipes here are cross posted there as well.

I'm 41 currently, a very busy man who works two jobs at this time, run my own wedding photography business, going to college working on a Fine Arts degree and finding time between all of that to write, blog, play video and other games and still maintain a social life and family life while keeping up to date with news and politics, reading and a host of eclectic interests and hobbies. What this means here for this blog, is that I won't be publishing on a regular basis and could be weeks between posts, regardless of my real life efforts in the kitchen. However, I think you will find some great recipes and stories and perhaps some inspiration watching a noob cook like myself find his voice in the kitchen. So with that in mind, please feel free to become a follower for this blog and enjoy!