About This Blog

Welcome to my cooking blog, Kitchen Convivial!

Hi, I’m Dave. I’m a computer scientist and amateur artist that happens to have a passion and occasional obsession for cooking and food presentation. My other interests include inline skating, bicycling, great beer, travel, dining, art, word play, science, philosophy, dimples of venus, and semicolons. (What? Not enough about me? OK, check out this post.)

I like to cook even more than I like to eat, so here I present meals I’ve made, some recipes, and some serving suggestions. I started the blog in March, 2012, but filled it with my backlog of creations that I had been saving… back to 2010. While I’ve always felt competent to cook simple foods (i.e., things with 7 or fewer ingredients – what I call “bachelor cooking”), after much living, dining, and travel, I seem to have passively accumulated enough culinary experience to know what ingredients might work well, what techniques might be used, and what novel adaptations might work with others’ recipes.

I don’t always include full recipes in my posts because I don’t use them verbatim and I rarely precisely measure ingredients; however, I post the result here not to annoy those that want to cook from precise instructions, but rather to share cooking ideas with you!

Like a good research scientist, when I use others’ recipes for hints or inspiration, I include links to them for reference and to give credit to whom it’s due. The kitchen isn’t a place to keep things confidential; it’s a place for sharing, conviviality, and celebration!

All the other photographs on this site are my photographic and/or artistic works.

Lastly, hell will probably freeze over before I post a dessert recipe.
If you’re into sweets, check out Sweet Pea’s Kitchen and Summer of Pie, where they’re crazy about that sh*t. :-)

Peace to you and yours.

9 responses

  3. Hey Dave!! We are in the same region as you, the great lakes… it’s new to us however, we are used to desert conditions. We recently transplanted our family here from Az. I like how you admit to adapting recipes in the kitchen, yet getting your idea from a source and giving credit to that source. We are blogging, BRAND spankin new to us, and we are trying to cite any source we begin with… do you know if there is a “specific” way to cite these books that is “proper” for blogging? I have been linking the cookbooks we use to where they can be found on amazon, I post their recipes, but also state I am adapting the recipe. Anyways… thanks for any feedback you have!

    Reply

    • Hi K (assuming you’re the K from your “about”), welcome to one of the states with 10,000 lakes and more recently to blogging… perhaps both of those are the opposite of being in a desert. :)

      Re: citations, the way you’re doing it for cookbooks is nice. If the cookbook doesn’t have it’s own website, your idea of linking to Amazon seems reasonable; you’re just a slight risk of Amazon reorganizing their content/URLs and the link getting broken later, but that is the same risk with linking to blogs (that might go defunct). Another option would be for you to link to your own page or post with a review or details of the cookbook, like author on ISBN. As with anything on the web, convenience (and content) is king; people are way more likely to look into it if they can click, instead of having to cut-and-paste the name into Google or whatever.

      I’m more likely to spill on my laptop computer than a cookbook in my kitchen. I think I only own three cookbooks, and only used one of them in the past 10 years… Google makes it so easy to find great recipes on the web. At Thanksgiviing, I was reading my sister-in-law’s “old” Croatian recipes and some hand-written by her family. I was surprised to see that they used weights for a lot of spice and ingredient measures, e.g. dekagrams rather than t. or T.; wow, it seemed inconvenient (but she did say they always had a scale in the kitchen), but they must learn to approximate just like we might for volume measures.

      Enjoy the cooking and blogging! :)

      Reply

      • Oh, one other non-obvious tip you might like is to tag your posts with additional (seemingly obvious) subjects like “cooking”, “food”, and “recipe.” I think this helps some people discover your posts because they sometimes read by WordPress Topics: http://wordpress.com/#!/topics/

      • Blogging and the great lakes are new to us, but the lakes (moisture) is what truly defines our time away from the desert. As for blogging, it is new… but with less moisture. ;)
        When I go to add a new cookbook I generally look for the link directly to a website, however when none can be found… Amazon it is. I see your point about Amazon re-doing some portion of it’s website, and thereby disturbing the URL I post… I’ll have to keep playing with the citations. A girlfriend of mine wrote a book (http://www.cengage.com/aushed/instructor.do?disciplinenumber=1016&product_isbn=9781111345488&courseid=EN06&codeid=2B12&subTab=&mainTab=Extras&mailFlag=true&topicName=) in which she heavily discusses citations… I may have to tap her for advice. Thanks for putting the thought into my brain.
        We love cookbooks, something about seeing the marks from previous attempts cooking (stains, notations on the page, etc) seems to make me feel connected. Plus I am TOO chicken to take something electronic into the kitchen with me… I wouldn’t just spill something on the computer, I might marinate/cook and somehow serve it on a plate as well. Best to keep it away from me while I’m cooking. HA

      • I am also trying to figure out the whole tagging situation. I’ll give your link a look and see if it helps me. Seriously though, I am SO not technically savy… I can’t even figure out how to “find” blogs on wordpress. I just start going through “freshly pressed” sites, looking at comments and clicking away. So I wouldn’t have the faintest idea on how to us a tag line to find other bloggers.
        Yup… I’m lame! :-)

  4. “7 or fewer ingredients”
    I like that !!
    That’s my style of cooking.
    My biggest fault in the kitchen is NOT FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS!!! So the fewer ingredients, the better off I am.

    Reply

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