Happy Birthday, Mom

First let this be said: you are every bit as beautiful, inside and out, as if today marked the 30th year of your life. And our gift to you on this day of days is, in fact, a birth of its own. This will be the first entry in a blog that we hope will serve as a depository for our family’s collective food correspondences. The Internet, and more specifically the blog, has the now familiar ability to cut across the disparate time and space that separates our schedules, our homes, and indeed our kitchens. In the past couple of years, our family has gotten into a wonderful habit of documenting our various creative culinary endeavors and emailing the resulting images and recipes to one another. The small cooking community this has engendered has only gained momentum as Nicole has blossomed into a burgeoning pastry chef, and Gavin, often occupying the whole-iest food periphery, has inevitably caught the amateur chef bug. Our intention is that The Expanded McKenzie Kitchen will chronicle our growth together as impassioned food lovers and as aspirant chefs, and that it might create an easily accessible archive for all of our culinary undertakings. An athenaeum, of sorts, of our ever expanding family kitchen.

Under the influence of your love of food and of your own tireless kitchen, there have been countless lessons that we all have learned. None of them, however, have had as much import as these two:


First, that a recipe is only a suggestion.


And second, that except under extenuating circumstance, there is seldom good excuse for a bad meal.

Happy Birthday, and happy blogging!

Love,
Nicole and Ol