My Kitchen

A love of cooking and food is one of the strongest things I share with my parents. The majority of the food eaten in my family is bought as raw ingredients and is prepared by everyone. Only when we're all feeling lazy, we'll get take out from only China Gourmet, Thai Kitchen, Dominic's, Alfonso's, or my short registry of sushi places. My parents are very picky with their take out, especially italian food.

My mother is the only person in the family that regularly eats any breakfast (Irish oatmeal) and we all do different things for lunch, at different times. The only meal that is consistently eaten together is dinner, at our kitchen table. We eat dinner with each other every night. There's no TV in our kitchen, because we like to force conversation with one another.

Though I'm a vegetarian, no one else in my family is, and we prepare a lot of meat. We get everything from our local butcher, Rambo's. If I'm cooking, I usually make multiple small dishes, with at least one of them containing some form of meat. We try buying as much local produce as possible, usually from Melick's Farm Stand. Everything else comes from Costco.

My family doesn't really cook from any specific cuisine. My dad really likes to grill outdoors and my mother likes to bakes. I like cooking gourmet, and make all sorts of different types of food, from French, Mexican, Italian, to Indian, Ethiopian, and Middle Eastern. The kitchen always smells of spices.

There is really no average week of what we buy, because rarely is something ever made twice in our kitchen.
What we usually buy ($200-250 per week)

Fresh Vegetables: Pepers, Onions, cucumbers, cabbage, carrots, leeks, scallions, potatoes, olives, tomatoes, bok choy.
Fresh Fruit: Apples, cranberries, leeches, bananas
Dairy: Gouda, Gruyere, Blue Cheese, Jack Chese, milk, heavy cream, cream cheese, unsalted butter
Meat and eggs: Lamb, ground beef, chicken, eggs, swordfish
Starch: bagels, flour, rice, lasagna noodles, lentils, egg noodles, siracha peas
Misc: Reisling, soy sauce, sriracha sauce