Welcome to Chez RosenBum

People who know David and I as a couple would probably be surprised to know that food wasn't initially a very important part of our relationship. Past about the first week of dating, I can count the number of times that we went out for dinner in that first year (just the two of us) on one hand. More importantly, we didn't really cook for each other much either. It started with weekend breakfasts, grew to weekend dinners, but didn't really move into the place we are now until we moved in together. It wasn't easy, at first, as we'd both grown up with different ways of eating and had certainly gotten into our own specific habits when living alone. David grew up with unsalted butter and sugared fruit and I couldn't fathom the point of butter without salt but thought that putting sugar on strawberries was gilding the lily. What we had in common though was a love of eating, and more importantly, a love of cooking.

We have a few other things in common too that make our gastronomical relationship simpatico: we both find comfort in culinary schedules and we're both willing to commit to a big-ass project. This means that while we eat the same thing for breakfast pretty much every weekend (cinnamon buns on Saturday and our seasonal menu on Sunday), Saturday dinner could be pulled pork smoked for 8 hours in our barrel smoker or homemade pizza with dough that's been resting for 24 hours.

Differences, of course, continue to emerge. David isn't able somehow to clean up after himself as he goes, so his forays into the kitchen are marked with a hurricane-like path of destruction in his wake. I lack the patience to excel at making pastry and somehow can't make fish without smoking the apartment out completely (these tasks are ceded entirely to David). I am perhaps also not as flexible of an eater as I might be, which means we don't eat as much seafood or spice as David would like. 

We were lucky enough to do a test kitchen blog for SweetSpot.ca for almost a year, until they were shuttered, and that really gave us a taste of sharing with the people we care about what we enjoy producing in our kitchen. What we talk about here won't probably be quite so detail focused, but instead talking about the kinds of things we're cooking on a day to day basis and other topics related to food, wine, and entertaining. We're remarkably inconsistent with our food snobbery (we do love McDonald's on a road trip, for example), but the one thing we remain unbending on is our commitment, when we're both home, to sit down at the table together for dinner. We hope you'll join us.