well, hello.

Well, it's true. Summer is off pursuing her design interests full time, and between me working every weekend, baby-sitting during the week, and hunting down freelance work wherever I can (drop me a line!), things around here have been placed on the back burner, so to speak. (Sorry. I know that was a terrible pun.)

So, now you're stuck with me! I feel like I should address some slight changes now that the lineup has shuffled- the most important and glaringly obvious one being that I DON'T BAKE. I know, stop the presses. We never got around to making an F.A.Q. for this blog, but if we did, it would have looked something like this:

Q: "How do you find the time to do all this?!"
A: We're both stay-at-home moms. It takes a lot of time, actually, and for awhile we made plenty of time for it, but lately we've been finding ourselves with less and less time to do fancy things. So it goes! Life with children is constantly evolving.

Q: "How do you eat all this stuff without gaining a million pounds?!"
A: Er, I don't. Summer eats some of it, but it usually gets (or used to get) evenly distributed between friends and family. I actually try to eat as healthy as possible and I've put a lot of work into my diet over the last year or so, and I avoid pastries like the plague, generally speaking. The problem is that I find them ADORABLE and I love taking photographs of them. But yeah, I don't bake. Well, I bake bread. Rarely. And usually just so I can take cute pictures of it. And I always bake mini-loaves.

Q: "What kind of camera do you use?!"
A: A canon 20D with a kit lens and a 50mm 1.8 lens.

There! The F.A.Q. you've been waiting for, all this time.

Anyway, I can't promise that I'l maintain updates as frequently in the past (actually, I think I've already proven that I can't maintain the momentum we once had, but whatever.) but I do plan to update whenever we cook something that seems interesting. Our weekly menus are usually just a mishmash of old standards- pasta night, salad night, stir fry night, roast veg and meat night, etc.- we eat as cheap and healthy as possible, for the most part. Occasionally we splurge and do something fun. When that happens, I'll be happy to share it here.

I also plan to showcase guest blogs from a lot of my friends- Portland has an amazing food community, and working in the food industry for so long means that I can get my hands on some neat people to contribute. I want to feature locally produced foods, as close to farm-to-table as possible. (can I squeeze in a few more foodie buzz words please? I'm avoiding the dreaded "locavore" for all your sakes.) I want to show what my friends make in their home kitchens, their work kitchens, and more, and I'd like it to be pertinent to you, the reader. Because if nobody was reading this, frankly- I wouldn't bother, haha.

So! As always, keep an eye on this space, watch as it evolves. For time killers, there's always my flickr page which I update pretty much daily. (Warning- contains about 8 bajillion pictures of my 2 1/2 year old son. Borrrring!) I just started a new blog called ten dollar drawings where I am offering (omg! surprise!) drawings for 10 bucks. My personal website will be getting an overhaul as soon as I get around to it (oh man, that's a laugh), and dang, I think that's about it unless you want to be my facebook buddy and read my stupid status updates that say crap like, "Alicia Carrier is so full of gumbo." Excitement!

I love hearing from you, so if you have any questions or requests for future posts, let me know. Have a lovely evening, tomorrow I'm looking forward to getting in on a gumbo taste-off with my husband's coworkers. The results will be posted here, of course. ("Wait, that's not healthy!" "SHUT UP.")