The Foul Weather Blogger

Dear fellow Gastro Junkies,

Last week I made a beautiful aioli from scratch the old fashioned way with a mortar and pestle. On Monday you would have found me slaving over a pot of beef stew, well past the hour of the night when normal people would have turned in their aprons for the evening. Last night I fixed up a stir fry with noodles that I had made from scratch and cut by hand. (Mr. gastro came home from work to discover me covered in flour, shoo-ing the cat away from the table where my beloved lo-mein were drying.) And tonight I am making Julia Child's Beuf Bourguignon with Pommes Dauphinoise. Later this week I have plans to tackle Ratatouille.

And this seriously isn't even the half of it. Pork chops with rosemary and mustard, my dad's linguini with clams, pan seared salmon steaks, peanut butter pie on Valentines day...I could go on. I sincerely wish, Oh Gastro-readers, that I could say I am able to tackle all these involved multi-course meals in my free time around work, but I would be a liar. Confession time. I was laid off from my job last Monday, the job that I only just recently landed at the dream company where I was happy, entertained, and financially stable for a whole month and a half before being downsized. (I was certainly not the only one. 35 of my new friends went along with me, many with years and years put into this company. My heart goes out to each and every one of them.) But here's the thing folks. This is not my first time being laid off. This isn't even the first time in the past 365 days. The first time I was laid off was last April, when my team was cut from the Theater we had been fundraising for. Which also happened to be right before I began this blog.

Oh yeah. I probably could have mentioned back in April time that all this free time I had to blog and cook was really due to my lack of employment, and looking back, I do make a handful of references to my job search, or vague, unnamed financial troubles. Still. I never really came right out and said, "I am doing this thing because I have to, because if I don't do something I am going to slip into a deep depression and die from a fatal overdose of hot dogs and macaroni and cheese." But now I'm back, in nearly the exact same position I was in back in April, so I'm saying it now. I need to cook, and I need to write, because I need to do something.

Does this make me a foul weather blogger? Certainly. I was definitely absent enough when I was planning my wedding, working for a video game company, enjoying my newlywed status. Fair. I can own that. But does it mean that I don't love cooking, or writing, or writing about cooking? Of course not. It's just that now I don't just love it--I need it too.

A little reprieve from my being a total bummer: I'm having a blast. There is a very real part of me that couldn't be happier than when I am dancing around my kitchen, listening to Nina Simone records and rolling out dough, browning beef, whipping cream. I'm in absolute heaven. The feminist side of my brain will sometimes look at me in this state, and sneer, "You look like you wish you had been born in the forties so you could be a housewife and do this all the time!" And when faced with this commentary I can only respond, "Maybe I do."

So I am at times a crap feminist. Guilty. And I also understand that I cannot be without a job, not do I really want to be. I want to find success and satisfaction in my career. But the fact of the matter is that right now, I just don't have a career. Not yet. So I seek success in the kitchen instead. Because it's fun, and I could use a little fun right now, and some comfort, and some activity.

So I hope all of you loyal Gastro-readers will forgive my on again, off again blogging, and perhaps even give me a pass now that I've given you the real scoop on the genesis of the Gastro-Junkie--this thing is all about passion, yes, but it is also about therapy--a fact I guess I forgot to mention before. You will almost certainly be seeing a lot more of me over the coming weeks, a fact that has its up side and its down, but please believe, dear readers, that having the space and the time to be a full time cook and writer, at least for a little while, is a big, huge silver lining. Much love,

Morgan