Fairly early in my working career it was obvious I needed to learn to cook or find some source of extra income to pay for a regular diet of counter meals and take aways. You're going to be up for rent and other costs and if you're looking to buy music, reading material and interesting things to eat and drink something has to give.
In The Little House of Concrete, a tight budget when the original structure went up meant there were things you'd take for granted in the average home that had to fall by the wayside, and over the past fourteen years we'd managed to catch up with most of them, with one substantial exception. We needed an oven.
For years we managed to get around not having an actual in-built roasting and baking device, first by avoiding those activities altogether, then by sitting a small combination grill and oven on the benchtop, but, eventually something had to be done because, for a start, if we ever look like wanting to sell prospective buyers are probably going to look at the kitchen, and the first thing they'd have noted would be the absence of an actual oven.
There wasn't a dishwasher or a decent sized pantry either, but those matters were an addendum to the oven question, and fitting an oven into an existing kitchen where there isn't a provision for one is likely to be a rather tricky exercise, so it was always going to be a matter of a whole new kitchen..
Now, having run considerably over the initial budgetary estimates in the process the LHoc Kitchen boasts all three, along with substantially enhanced work and storage space.
The refurbished kitchen has brought with it a renewed interest in culinary matters, and with the impending close of MobileMe the content from the original LHoc wesite needs to be relocated, so it made sense (at least it did to me) to kill two birds with the single metaphoric projectile and port the old content over here to join the musings on more recent adventures in the culinary arts.
Much of the same content will be found in the intermittent posts to my food blog, but the plan, at least at the moment is to use the two as a sort of condensed version of the recipe library that's gradually been built up over the years.
It's easy enough to build up a substantial library of recipes in these days of internet search engines, and my no longer supported recipe application (Yum) is no longer supported, so I'm in the process of adding that sort of content to Bento, with the regular favourites being recycled here and over on the LHoC Kitchen blog.