About

 

The Rut

We’ve all been there. You’re standing in line at your local grocery store doing your weekly shopping and suddenly it dawns on you. You are stuck in a BIG rut. At least, that has been my experience. I looked in my cart and realized I had the same 20-25 things in there that I buy each and every week. Come on, you know your list of “standards” is running through your mind right now. For me a sampling would be onions, baby bella mushrooms, red peppers, baby spinach, cheese, chicken, etc. Alright. I’ll fess up. My cart also contains M&M’S and Coke. Hey . . . everyone has a guilty pleasure or two for evening TV time. Right? That routine Saturday morning at my local grocery store is when I realized that I have to mix it up.

The Gal Behind the Rut

Oh! I nearly forgot to tell you who I am. My name is Sally Kemball-Cook and I love food. And I mean love food. I have been obsessed with it since the tender age of – well, under 10, I guess. I can remember beautiful Saturdays as a kid spent inside the house glued to the TV, much to my parent’s chagrin. What was I watching? The French Chef on PBS, of course. Julia Child was my favorite but back then I watched every single show I could. The Frugal Gourmet and Yan Can Cook were still on and The Food Network was but a pipe dream. After all, it was the eighties. So Saturday morning was the time for me to get my cooking show fix. I was (and still am) a self proclaimed food geek and proud of it!

By day, I’m a good worker bee and can be found playing the role of sales girl extraordinaire for a food service distributor. At night, you ask? At night I can usually be found in my Newburyport, MA kitchen chopping, slicing, mixing and pretending I’m on camera in the Food Network kitchens. Well . . . you’ll find me along with my ever faithful 130 pound St. Bernard, Mastiff, Bloodhound mix named Fletch. He lies in my pantry praying for scraps. He never gets them but hope springs eternal I guess.

How I Found My Rut

My cooking conundrum has been that I am just not a recipe and cookbook kind of girl and thus, I often lack culinary inspiration. I don’t think I’ve ever followed an exact recipe in my entire life and I’ve certainly never read more than a few pages from any cookbook. In fact, I recently moved into a new home and my one measly 1/2 carton of cookbooks wound up in the charity section “by mistake.” The only two I was really sad about losing were the copies of Joy of Cooking and Larousse Gastronomique that my Mom gave me. Sorry Mom! Back to my point, though. You are not going to find me in the food section of my local bookstore perusing and ultimately buying cookbooks. Cookbooks don’t work for me because ultimately, I am an instinctive cook and following a recipe step by step seems a bit – well, boring to me.

What do I mean by instinctive cook? If I want to make something new, I may hop on the internet, look up a recipe for, say, Chimichurri Sauce, and spend 10 seconds glancing at the ingredient list. I don’t look at quantities, method, prep or cooking time unless the dish is really foreign to me. Usually I can use that instinct of mine to figure out how to make the dish work. I almost never measure anything and chopping things evenly? Fugettaboutit!!!  Classically trained I am not. It comes down to the fact that I really just enjoy the challenge of cooking. It is exceedingly rare for me to stick to an ingredient list and not deviate in one, two or ten ways. The problem is that you can only make so many things and get so creative with the same 20-25 ingredients all the time.

Gettin’ Out of The Rut, Baby!

So we’re back to that rut and ultimately, the subject of my blog, The Risky Kitchen. I’m changing the way I do things. From now on I will wander the aisles of my grocery store, farmer’s market and specialty food shop with thoughts of DIFFERENT. Buy it and try it. That’s my goal and I am very excited to discover what appears on my cooking agenda and to share the journey with you.

I encourage you to challenge me as well. Send me your ideas. Send me your recipe variations. Try to stump me with a funky ingredient. Join me in culinary risk taking. My promise to you is to share the good, the bad and the downright ugly in this blog and to learn all I can about food (and even wine) pairings. Taking risks and not being afraid of the outcome is the name of the game. Hence, The Risky Kitchen. After all, it’s not like I’m going to poison anybody.

At least, I hope not.