Four months later – hello! In my absence I have cooked many things and also had a baby. Amazing, is it not? And since Greyson dumped a glass of iced tea in my laptop while I was feeding said baby, I also have a new laptop. Parenthood, it is a challenging and unexpectedly expensive thing.

Since technically it was uploaded and mostly ready to go yesterday, I am going to write this goal off as a success.

http://www.kitchenista.org is live! I’ve moved all my food posts over and in the future will be posting my recipes and reviews there, reserving life@justthere for more …well, life related things. Feel free to update your bookmarks accordingly as really, the food is the interesting part.

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go wrangle my screaming toddler now.

Still plugging away at a new design (and perhaps an new URL! stay tuned.) and with my toddler’s current obsession with getting out of bed the second we shut the door, time is at a premium. As is sleep, but that’s actually good training for the new kid. As a result, dinner has been relatively uneventful and dessert has been popsicles, thus the lack of recent posts. And to top that off, my nesting instinct has kicked in and I am compelled to clean out and organize every cabinet and drawer in the kitchen. I am pretty sure this is my husband’s favorite part of life, period.

I did try an interesting experiment this evening, prompted by the monthly challenge in the LJ bakebakebake community: being creative with a box of cake mix. I can’t tell you what I did else I’ll give it away, but I think I’ll nail it down on the next try. Meanwhile, the Bi-Monthly Menu of Doom for this half of the month consists entirely of recipes from Mark Bittman’s “How To Cook Everything” and while all three things thus far have been delicious – the matambre in particular, and I will, in fact, write that up tomorrow – I can’t help but feel that NO ONE CARES about my penne alla vodka from tonight because it contained 5 ingredients. Similarly, the brown jambalaya was terrific, but not only was it very simple it photographs very poorly. Let’s be honest, no one wants to see a bowl of raw chicken, or “chopped” raw sausage. It’s just not visually appealing.

So, that’s the scoop for now, my goal is to have the secret experiment solid by the end of next week and the website up by the end of this weekend (yeah, right). We’ll see how that works out.

I am having the most ridiculous formatting issues with my posts, so expect a new look sometime in the near future. Perhaps a look that will not force me to edit and re-edit and re-edit trying to find the magic spacing combination to keep my divs from floating all over the place. Argh.

There is an unholy and desperately sad kind of amusement in preparing for a steak a poivre dinner while simultaneously making lemon-blackberry tarts (to be posted soon!) and having to run back to the computer to be reminded of how to bake a potato.

Pregnancy, thy name is brain-dead.

[14:54] <@Ali> no, there’s a stone you bake bread in your oven on
[14:54] <@Ali> wow
[14:55] <@Ali> let me try that again
[14:55] <@Ali> there’s a stone upon which you bake bread in your oven
[14:56] <@Cal>  Ali: Stupid prepositions! Complicating up where words go in!
[14:56] <+Sindri> A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
[14:58]  <@yellowgoat> Preposition placement is something I never much cared for.
[14:59] <@Ali> As long as it’s not superfluous, it doesn’t matter overly much to me where people put their prepositions at.

Greyson was being friendly with an older woman passing by us as I was putting the groceries in the car at Target. She was being friendly back and when Grey pointed at her bags, she told him it was cereal. I smiled at her and she went on to say, “That’s one good thing about not having a man around, you can eat cereal for dinner if you want.”

I think she might be on to something there.

This would all be so much easier if I could just post to here and Facebook at the same time! Meanwhile, I hope this weekend to have updated with all of the posts I’ve meant to make and just haven’t.

So, let me do a little introduction here and then we’ll get to the rest of it.

So, my name is Alicia and this is my kingdom. I’ve owned this domain now for…a long time. A decade, give or take a few service interruptions. It has been through many redesigns and served many purposes, but I always come back to writing about my life somehow.

As it says in my “About” page, I live in Utah with my husband, Warren, our son, Greyson, and our completely neurotic golden retriever, Faye. I am originally from southern Indiana, and I moved here in 2002 to live with Warren after an internet friendship to courtship thing. It works for us. Our son was born in September 2006 and a few months shy of his first birthday was diagnosed with developmental delay. If you want to get really technical, it’s officially undiagnosed cerebral palsy, but we opted not to saddle him with that label unless it proves necessary to get him any treatment he may need. Anyway, as a result of cerebral palsy he receives therapy twice monthly to try to strengthen his speech and gross motor abilities. Utah has a great system in place through the school district and he has made incredible progress through it. He’s a healthy, happy and active toddler now and I am constantly amazed at the way he works.

Warren and I made everything official with a wedding ceremony in June of 2008, an intimate affair with our close friends and families. A couple of months later, we decided to try for a brother or sister for Grey, since his motor skills are at a point where he can handle me having divided attention. Considering I’m now 23 weeks pregnant, you could say we met with success, and Grey will have a little brother sometime in May.

The birth of my son and his subsequent problems made going back to work next to impossible, and we are lucky enough to be in a position where I am able to stay at home with him and provide the daily physical therapy he needs. Unfortunately for all of us, being a housewife is not something I seem to have any natural aptitude for whatsoever and I have been a cranky mess ever since. Every now and then I’ll slip into a groove with the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry and the blessed never-ending tedium of every day being so similar to the last and think, you know, this gig isn’t so bad. And then I wake up from that dream and it’s back to being bad at time management, dinner being way too late, Grey not getting a bath, and no one having clean pajamas.

Something happened, though, with this new pregnancy. I suddenly want to cook and bake, ALL THE TIME. It’s a compulsion, I absolutely need to do it, and I’m not just talking about nuking a hot dog and throwing fries in the oven. I pour over cookbooks and food blogs, collecting recipes for my Bi-Monthly Grocery List of Doom, I’ve stopped buying bread and started making my own, and possibly the strangest thing, I opted to buy a KitchenAid mixer for Christmas instead of photography equipment (the only –and most expensive- hobby that has never waned as so many frequently do). Would you like to see it? Here it is:

Man, I love that thing. Without it, it’s possible I never would have made a loaf of bread. Kneading is intimidating. Actually, a lot of things I cook and bake now I would not have tried had it not been for my KitchenAid – not that I used it to make short ribs or Carbonnade a la Flamande, but I guess my success with that first loaf of bread gave me a confidence in the kitchen that I did not previously have. See, internet, I am a timid creature at heart, and new things are very intimidating. New things make me not want to try them because I am genetically programmed towards failure, and that is not a pleasant thing to be reminded of. For instance, you’ll note that I’ve talked about enjoying baking now, but as a result laundry and cleaning have definitely fallen to the wayside. I even fail at hausfrauery.

So, long story short, this blog belongs to a woman who has a newfound love of her kitchen (oh man, the chauvinist jokes that could be inserted here….) and will contain posts about food, posts about life in general and other tales of housewifely woes. It will be a pleasure to share my misadventures with you.

I’ve ported all of my entries over from my other domain (which shall remain unmentioned as it has a less than delicate name) over to this one, set up all my links and picked up and modified a theme I really like. There’s only one problem.

It keeps reverting to default.

WP says this is not their problem, that it’s a problem with how the theme is interpreted and blah blah, but what I know is that I found a theme I like and WP is making it not work right. Dear WP, plz fix. So if you’ve stumbled across this site and it’s the standard blue boring Kubrick, come back some other time and it’ll be the prettier modified Atahualpa theme.

In the next few days I’ll be adding a bunch of food-related posts that have been made on Facebook instead of a blog, and that fine tradition will continue here. I’ll explain more as I go, I promise.

Happy almost Inauguration Day!