Important Food-Related Events in the Life of the Donger (...and a Brief Introduction)

1980: The Donger takes so long coming out of the womb that she has a tooth growing in when she is finally pried out of her mom with forceps. Teeth are for eating.
1984: The Donger's mom institutes an eating rewards system, which features the payment of a dime for finishing a meal within two hours. The Donger never achieves success.
1986: The Donger's dad makes blueberry pancakes for breakfast one morning. The Donger pukes and never eats food made with berries ever again.
1988: The Donger's third-grade graduation gift is a jar of dill pickles, in honor of the fact that her father packed her a pickle with her lunch everyday. Her nickname at the time is "Picklebreath".
1992: The Donger writes on a school form that her perfect meal would consist of cream of mushroom soup, a variety of dim sum foods (including the crunchy tripe with spicy black bean sauce), and whipped cream with maraschino cherries for dessert.
1996: The Donger goes vegetarian because her friends are vegetarian and peer pressure works wonders on the minds of teenagers.
2000: The Donger learns from a college roommate that you are supposed to wait for the water to boil before putting the pasta in.
2003: After six years of being vegetarian, the smell of the Jack in the Box next to the Donger's place of employment is so alluring that she starts eating meat again. The first thing she ate was a turkey sandwich from the deli next door, shortly followed by a burger from the aforementioned Jack in the Box. It was good.
2004: The Donger purchases a studio loft apartment and is faced with her own kitchen for the first time. She christens it by buying a slightly scratched 5-qt All-Clad mixing bowl from the clearance section of Bloodbath & Beyond. Hello yuppiedom!
2005: The Donger buys a dead animal to cook for the first time. They are frozen chicken breasts from Trader Joe's. She boils them for her 90-lb mutt Ralphy and hopes he will stop shitting all over the apartment.
2007: The Donger becomes convinced that she needs to learn to cook and bake well. The Donger believes other people might find her misadventures in the kitchen entertaining, because she is somehow exponentially more haphazard than the average person, and starts a food and cooking blog.

And so it begins... I read other food and cooking blogs and I can tell you right now this isn't going to be like other blogs of that ilk, for the general reason that I can't really cook. I hardly ever buy meat (bacon excluded), I don't know how to cut up a chicken, I sometimes leave my own blood on the cutting board when I cut vegetables, and baking involves a hell of a lot more magic than science to me.

I am, however, pretty good at following directions (except when I get impatient, or forget ingredients and decide to make something anyway, or don't have a key piece of cookware and decide to "improvise"), and I love learning how to make new things. You won't be finding original recipes here just yet - you'll just read about me trying to make basic food out of The Joy of Cookingand the three other cookbooks I own, or something I took off the internet.

Anyhow, no more yanky my wanky... the Donger need food!