Introductions
Hi, we're Kurt and Debbie. We love food, and we love cooking. We both grew up in the Chicago area. Chicago is one of America's great melting pot cities. There were ethic restaurants of every kind all over the city and suburbs. If we read about an Afghan or Ethiopian restaurant coming to town, we would be there opening day. It was a gourmand's paradise! (Not to minimize New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, and other food meccas.)
Then we moved to the Denver area, and the restaurant landscape was much more limited. Lots of Mexican, Chinese, and Indian, and a few other cuisines. So we started buying cookbooks. Our collection exploded with books on ethnic and regional cuisines. If we couldn't find Afghan food in Denver, we would make our own, by cracky! We now have several hundred print cookbooks, and at least that many in e-book form (we haven't counted). And by the way, the restaurant scene in Colorado is much more diverse now. Which hasn't stopped us from buying more cookbooks!
We like variety. We like to try new cuisines, new cooking methods, new flavors, and new ingredients. Which results in lots of new recipes! We had someone living with us for a few months, and at one point they asked us if we ever made the same thing for dinner more than once. We laughed and said, "Not if we can help it!"
About Our Blog
A lot of food blogs focus on a specific niche—special diets, like paleo or keto; regional or international or regional cuisines; appliances, like the Instant Pot; or other specialties.
We're going to feature all those, and more. Our niche is Variety! You'll find a bit of everything here, because that's how we cook.
A Few Words on Cuisines
We're pretty fussy about assigning nationalities to recipes. If we see a recipe with "Mexican" in the title and it contains non-traditional ingredients like beef, cumin, and cheese, we're not going to call our version of it Mexican. We'll call it Tex-Mex or Southwestern—depending on the ingredients, because those are two different things! So you'll see recipe names like "Moroccan Style Soup", or "Chicken with Moroccan Spices", unless we're confident that it's an authentic Moroccan recipe.
Our Promises to You
Our goal is to build a site where you can focus on the our recipes and other content with as few distractions as possible. Food blogs should be fun and educational, and not annoying! So we promise:
No Popups!
We're not going to open windows to ask you to subscribe to our newsletter, or for any other reason. If you want to get notifications on new information on our site, you'll find 'Subscribe' links on the menu and page footer, and social media links on the sidebar and page footer.
Ads
Yes, we'll have ads on our site eventually. That's one of the primary ways that bloggers make money. We'll do our best to keep it at a minimum, but that will depend a lot on the ad service we use. We won't complain if you're using an ad blocker (see the "No Popups" rule above). But we would appreciate it if you would turn your blocker off once in a while when you visit us to help us keep bringing you new recipes.
Affiliate Links
Yes, we'll have those too. It's another way bloggers get income. We will flag any affiliate links so you know that we'll be making a bit of cash if you follow them and buy something. And of course, affiliate links won't increase the price of the product.
Diets
We don't follow any special diets, other than trying to maintain a lower-carb, no-sugar diet because we're both type 2 diabetic. Since we don't have much experience with other diets we won't try to label any of our recipes as paleo, keto, vegan, or any other type of diet. We don't want to make a mistake because we don't have enough information. If you follow any special diet, you can probably tell by looking at the ingredients if it's something you can make, or you'll probably know how to make substitutions to fit your diet.