hello!

i spent years threatening to start a food blog. in high school, i worked in our local public library shelving books and one of my favorite places to shelve was the cookbook section. i'd check out a thick stack of them and go through them, looking at pictures of really gorgeous food with ingredients that were damn near exotic for a girl with an exceptionally picky palate who ate chicken strips at every restaurant from the ages of four to eighteen. i didn't eat tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, and i was always incredibly suspicious that my mother was sneaking said things into my food.

growing up, one of my favorite places to be was in the kitchen. i grew up in a home where the kitchen was the epicenter and i remember being young and always in there when my mom was making dinner. (usually to make sure she wasn't putting any hated vegetables in my dinner but i digress). as i got older, i longed to help and by the time i graduated from high school and moved out into the big bad world, i could do the basics of cooking but i always wanted to learn more. some setbacks came my way and over the course of college, i moved home twice and it was always in the cookbook section and in the kitchen where i found solace. i learned how to cook. i learned to like tomatoes and onions and tried my hand at baking and braising meat. i started to learn family recipes and started making up my own.

i learned to love food.

i've learned so much about food in my life and i've always been eager to teach others what i know. yeah, there's not too much of a trick to making red sauce but there is a trick to making good red sauce and i want to show you. ground beef tacos are the easiest thing in the world but you can elevate them so easily and i want to tell you how.

(i've always been a bossy older sister)

so welcome to my blog and watch this space for recipes and stories and hopefully, a grand old time.

my name is allison and i think we're gonna be friends.