A Little About Us…

Hi, and welcome to our blog :)

We're the Silvas, and we love to cook good food. It's funny how that came to be, because when my husband and I first got married, he had no idea that I could cook anything, and I had no idea he could cook anything either. I remember one of the first times I was hanging out with him. I had just moved into a new apartment so I wasn't familiar with my new kitchen yet. My husband (boyfriend at the time) and I had bought a tube of those Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. We opened the tube up, placed the cinnamon rolls onto a baking sheet, and popped it into my oven. It was the first time I had ever used that oven. Anyway, about THREE minutes later, it smelled like something was burning! I opened the oven to find the cinnamon rolls already smoking up and they were all black! We frantically removed them from the oven and started opening all the windows to let out all the smoke. That's how I learned that something was off about my new oven because it was definitely heating up to wayyyy hotter than the temperature we had set it to. It was a terrible first impression of my cooking abilities, but that didn't stop my then boyfriend from eventually marrying me. It would be like a year I think before I ever tried cooking in front of him again.

Anyway, when we got our first little townhome, it had the tiniest kitchen ever! I remember the first time we walked through that place and the manager mentioned that it wasn't the biggest kitchen, and my husband said "It's ok, we don't cook anyway!" We ate out a lot, and whenever we did eat at home, it was stuff like hot pockets and frozen burritos. Our most advanced meal was a package of spaghetti noodles, and a jar of spaghetti sauce with ground beef added to it. To be honest, I was super nervous to cook for others, so I just didn't do it. On top of that, any time I looked up a recipe, it called out like three or four different seasonings that we didn't have so it just seemed like a big upfront cost to get all the stuff I needed to cook a decent meal, which was another reason I didn't get into doing some real cooking for quite a while.

A picture of one of our first "fancy" meals. Frozen ravioli cooked with jarred sauce and ground beef and a glass of sparkling cider. We didn't own a dining table so we ate our meals at the coffee table in our living room.

Fast forward to today, and we cook almost every meal at home! We also cook most of them completely from scratch. Sure, there is still a spot on our menu for a simple spaghetti made out of jarred sauce and ground beef, but we seriously cook most of our meals. I will share more of our journey on how we transitioned over from eating out to cooking everything in future posts, but one thing I'll mention now is that we took it slow and gradually! It started with a goal to cook only one nice meal a week, and as we found recipes we liked and wanted to keep, we started growing a collection of "keepers." Also, the more I made these "keeper" recipes, the faster I got at making them! That made it easier and easier to gradually move up to making two nices meals a week, then three a week, and now we are at about five a week (this leaves us room for one leftover night and one night to either grab takeout, fend for ourselves, etc.). I have found five nice meals to be the most realistic for our family, since I have planned and shopped for seven dinners many times, only to find that things came up during the week and I was rolling a couple of extra meals over into the next week's meal plan. So five dinners a week it is.

My hope for this blog is to create a place to store all our recipes, as well as share our journey of how we went from never cooking to cooking all the time! We also manage to do this with constantly-changing schedules, busy careers, and our two little ones, so I will share the tips and tricks I have developed over the years to help us to manage it all! Anyway, that's it for now. See you in the next post!