The Half-Blood Chef

Where are my Harry Potter fans? I absolutely adore the whole series. Truth be told, I read all seven books in the month of August when my oldest, Noah, was just two months old. My husband, Andrew, was on assignment with work, to live and work at one of the Young Life camps in New York for the month of August. I got to tag along with Noah and live on Saranac Lake for a full four weeks! It is an absolutely beautiful place and calling it home for a month was pretty special. It was also a pretty lonely time. I was a brand-new mom. Our son had just turned 8 weeks old when we arrived at Saranac and I was still getting used to the rhythms of motherhood, nursing, finding sleep and learning how to be social once again.

I spent so many hours nursing and napping with my little one and with that came reading! I had read the first book of the Harry Potter series multiple times. I loved it, but was never in a place where it was a good time for me to invest in a whole series that I knew would suck all of my attention! The time at Saranac was it! I brought the whole series with me, thinking it was probably rather ambitious, but I burned through all seven books! I read while I nursed, while Noah napped, on the lake beach with my feet in the sand, on the boat and next to the night time fires. I was fully absorbed in the story and it was made even more enjoyable that I literally had a full month of no other obligations other than Noah. Book 6, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was one of my favorites.

Smooth Segway here...it was my brother, Austin, who gave me the title of "Half-Blood Chef". He said, "You never just make a dish according to the recipe. You always alter it, cross things out, add things in, change the whole cooking method and typically remake the recipe. You're basically the Half-Blood Prince, but a chef". I loved that so much! I think that is exactly how cooking should be. The more time I spent in the kitchen, the more experimental I became. I used to follow recipes to the letter when I first started out, but as I grew as a cook, I began to learn little tricks and tips that changed my cooking for the better. I started to implement them in all of my cooking and played around with flavors and substitutions. Some of the biggest things I have learned are the importance of timing, proper heat, and the importance of acid.

If you look inside any of my cookbooks on the shelves, you will likely find pen marks, that cross out ingredients, sometimes omitting them altogether. There are notes for ingredients to add in or substitute as well as, what I think, notes for a more concise way of cooking - much like professor Snape marking up his potions books with all of his notes and amendments. Spoiler - but I really cannot apologize because the book was released in 2005 and then in 2009 as a film. So, you have had plenty of time to get that task done.

Do you write in your cookbooks? If I ever have the privilege of writing a cookbook, I hope that's what people will do with it. Make it their own and mark it up. (But maybe not too much, because I'm proud of my recipes and think they are pretty great as is. Maybe just don't tell me about it. HA)! Some people don't want to mark them up at all because they are too pretty...I get it, I do, but a cookbook is made to be used. You know it's a good one when the spine of the book is breaking, the pages are worn and splattered and sometimes they are marked up. At the very least, you can star the ones you particularly love!