how this blog came to be...

As baking my own sweets when growing up was the only way to get desserts in the house, I have loved baking since I was little.  The desire of cooking new treats by following recipes to a T comes from my dad.  The ability to mix random leftovers until a tasty new dish appears comes from my mom.  But the love of being in the kitchen (for cooking not cleaning) I inherited straight from my Gram.

I married the boy of my dreams (maybe I should say man), and we almost immediately moved to Moscow.  While living overseas, we managed to recreate many of our favorite dishes from back home; however, inevitably we would not be able to find many of the necessary ingredients.  While in Russia, I learned an important lesson about recipes and their amazing flexibility.  As I found substitutions for certain ingredients, I wrote down the new recipe so I could make it again.  This quickly turned into looking at lots of different recipes and making up my own based on what I could find and what looked tastiest.  So proud of how delicious the food was (and a fair amount of free time) I took tons of photos of the finished dishes and made a cookbook for our parents as a Christmas present. 

That was supposed to be the end of my obsession of taking pictures of food but it wasn’t.  Just ask Annie.  So instead of just showing pictures of mouthwatering food, I’ll include the recipes too because once you see the picture you’ll want to make it!

yum and enjoy!