Thank you, Mark Bittman

Some people are whizzes at cooking. They know what flavors go well together, what seasonings to add to enhance flavor, etc. I am not a cooking whiz. I am a cooking idiot. Once I almost set my kitchen on fire while boiling water (luckily the sink was next to the stove). I can barely decipher recipes. There's always some ingredient I've never heard of, a technique I have no clue about, or some kitchen appliance or dish I can never find in the store. For most of my life, my two "homemade" dishes were spaghetti (with sauce out of a jar) and steak.

Then, one day, I came across Mark Bittman's Bitten blog at The New York Times. Oh, happy day! Finally I was able to leave the land of spaghetti and steak! The recipes were simple. I knew what the ingredients were AND I could find them at my local grocery store. I didn't need new equipment. Not matter how hard I tried, even I couldn't mess it up. Since then, I've tried a number of the recipes on the blog and every one of them has been a success. Thank you, Mark Bittman, for helping me enter the world of cooking.