What February 14th Means to Me...

For me, February 14th has nothing to do with roses and chocolates and over the top, absolutely ridiculous proclamations of "love."  However....my feelings towards Valentine's Day are for another, much different, post.  :)

So here's what actually happens on February 14th.  The state of Arizona turns another year older.  We became a state on February 14th, 1912.  Yes, that's right....that would mean today is Arizona's 100th Birthday!

Now I have to be honest.  Am I Arizona's biggest fan?  No.  I've spent most of my adult life thus far trying to get away from it.  There are two reasons for this.  First, I feel like everyone has a place.  Somewhere that is the embodiment of their personality.  Somewhere that you know when you're there that you're in the exact place that you should be.  For me, Arizona isn't that place.  Well, Phoenix isn't anyway, and that's where I spent the majority of my life.  I also think you can have more than one place (to date I think I have 5), but that's also another blog topic for another day.  Second....THE HEAT!  I mean really, I think the people who claim to love it when it's 120 degrees outside are lying.  It's awful, and it's not like you get a break from it when the sun goes down.  The high is 115 and the low is 112.  It's out of control and I HATE IT!  Give me humidity, cool evenings and lightning bugs over the oven-like feeling and lizards any day!

Arizona does have it's good points though.

• First point goes to Flagstaff.  I spent 4 years there attending Northern Arizona University, and it was the best choice I could have made for a school.  I got a great education, met amazing friends, had tons of fun and got to live somewhere so gorgeous for 4 years.  Located only 2 hours north of Phoenix it's located at an altitude of 7000 feet surrounded by the amazing San Francisco Peaks.  It's woodsy, it snows and the weather in the summer is mild and amazing.  I love everything about it (to the point where I have a hard time believing that it's actually part of Arizona), and if it were a slightly bigger city I might still be living there.  It's definitely one of my 5 places.
• Second point goes to the Grand Canyon.  Because it's awesome.  If you don't believe me...go there and see for yourself.
• Third point goes to the sunsets.  They're unlike any others I've seen.  It's likely because of all of the pollution, but if it gives me something pretty to look at on my way home I guess I'm okay with it.
• Fourth point goes to monsoon season.  My personal favorite part of the year in Arizona.  Lightning storms are amazing to watch, and it's really the only time of year we get any significant amount of rain in the desert.
• Fifth and final point goes to all of our spring training facilities.  It's great to be able to watch baseball games before the season even starts (speaking of which, even though I don't pay attention to much until hockey season is over...pitchers and catchers report in only 6 days!).

Long story short...while it may not be my favorite place in the world as a whole, Arizona will always have a special place in my heart.  My family is here.  It's where I was raised (point six would probably be it's a great place to raise a family).  It's home.  So while I don't plan on staying here forever...for now it's just fine.  

Now, this was a co-blog with mom, so head over her way to see her insights on our home state.  I know you'll enjoy what you read.  Happy Arizona's Birthday Everyone!

I Love to Cook

The title really says it all.  I love to cook.  I always have.  In my family, the love of cooking appears to have skipped a generation.  My younger sister and I both love to cook.  Our mom on the other hand, well, let's just say she doesn't share our joy.  That's not to say she's a bad cook, because she's not!  When she does cook, it always tastes wonderful.  If it didn't, we probably wouldn't have holiday dinners that pull in 30+ people every year (no joke, I think Christmas this year was an insane 35 people at one point!).  And with that, I give you the first mother/daughter co-blog.  Here's my story of how I came to love cooking, and please be sure to go read mom's post on how she doesn't love it.

I was a lucky kid growing up.  I had two amazing sets of grandparents that I spent a ton of time with.  Both of my grandmothers were amazing cooks, and I spent numerous hours in the kitchen with them.  First watching, and in awe of all of the amazing things they would always make.  Then I was old enough to help them cook, and that's when I gained an appreciation for cooking.  They both made everything from scratch and memory.  We all knew better than to ask for recipes, because they didn't exist. In fact they still don't exist, and now that they have both passed on I've tried my best to recreate some of the dishes they made.  Some of them have been successful (i.e. Nanny's potato salad), and some of them I've had to give up on because it will just never be the same (i.e Grandma's bean soup).

I was pretty young when they started having me help out in the kitchen.  I was a pretty great sous chef if I do say so myself!  I used to tear bread for stuffing, pick beans for soup and peel potatoes (Okay, so this one time I took a chunk out of my thumb with the potato peeler.  Don't worry, I was fine...but Nanny was more concerned with whether or not I had gotten blood on the potatoes than she was with the fact that I was now missing a piece of my thumb.  It's been my favorite scar ever since.).  They taught me the basics of cooking, and I'm forever grateful for that.

Now that I'm an adult, the kitchen is my happy place.  Well, the kitchen I picture myself having someday is my happy place.  My last two kitchens in DC and my parent's kitchen are sooooooooo small.  I need to picture the aforementioned dream kitchen in order to be able to cook in those kitchens without going a little crazy.  Once I get to the imaginary kitchen, I'm instantly calm.  Some people despise all of the prep work for cooking.  Slicing, dicing and grating....oh my!  I LOVE IT.  Doing all of the mundane prep work is cathartic.  Maybe it's the fact that you're usually stabbing or cutting something with a sharp knife, but once I start all of the stress from the day just melts away.  After that initial prep work to officially release the stress, I feel like nothing can go wrong from that point.  Usually, nothing does.  I have a pretty good track record for turning out tasty dishes.  Well, at least that's what I've been told, and I'm choosing to believe that no one's been lying to me!

My last year in DC was not the best for me.  Finances were the toughest they'd ever been, and work was slowly but surely killing a little piece of my soul (it sounds over dramatic, but unfortunately that's how it felt), but if I could end my night by cooking myself, and usually my roommate, a great meal, I felt like everything would be okay, and I could keep going for another day.  This feeling night after night eventually gave me my latest and greatest epiphany.  Culinary school.  Why not?  Cooking is one of two things in my life that I've consistently loved doing.  I can be a very indecisive person sometimes.  Not because I'm a flaky person, but because I get overly passionate about things very quickly, and it then takes me a while to realize that maybe whatever I'm passionate about at the moment isn't the right fit for me.  I dare someone to ask me how many times I considered changing my major in college.  Cooking though...it's always been a constant thing, and it always will be.  It's going to be a little while before I can start school, but you know that when the time comes I'll be here to tell you all about how awesome it is.  So stay tuned......