I write. It's what I do, so much so that when I think about who I am, the first appropriate noun I come to is writer. I am a writer going to grad school, a writer who happens to also be a mother, a writer who knits a lot.

One thing I am not: a cook. (My family loves to joke about the time twenty-year-old Kate made tuna and noodles without draining the noodles first.) I am, however, a writer who loves food. My relationship with food has been an evolving but always vital part of my life. At parties and holidays, I have to sample all the desserts. It never stops at one piece of pie. In high school, I went through that phase where I punished myself by not eating. While pregnant, I gained sixty pounds, because I knew I could eat whatever I wanted and in mass quantities. Then, about four years ago, I became a vegetarian (of the fish-eating variety) after reading about the unhealthy quality of affordable meat.

As much as writing is my passion, food is my passion, so when I decided to join the world of electronic publishing, my first instinct steered me to food. Thus, A Written Recipe was born, a written journey of my exploration into the world of vegetarian cooking. I could come up with a thousand logical reasons for why I chose food as a topic, but if I'm honest with myself, the answer is simple and much more guttural.

There is nothing more basic that a love of the thing that brings you nourishment. I work at writing. Even the blog sometimes is a chore, but I never tire of eating. It always fills me with a childlike delight. Food is pleasurable in the same way that sex is pleasurable, or reaching the ending of a very good book is pleasurable, or the way that watching your child succumb to peaceful slumber is pleasurable. So why not write about it?

Deciding to write a food blog, that was a no-brainer to me. What the food blog brought to my life was something unexpected. To me, the interesting thing isn't why I started a food blog, but why I continue to write one. It's about the quest to come up with things week after week to write about for my readers. It means always trying new foods, new recipes, new challenges in the kitchen. Of course, I hope my readers enjoy each new thing I come across in my blogging endeavors, but more importantly, I enjoy them. Each new taste, each bite, each plate I record to jpeg means a new experience for me. It means I'm pushing myself beyond my own boundaries, becoming wiser and widening my own palate. It means I am always having little successes and failures, things to look forward to and look back on with chagrin, things to learn, and things to enjoy, new tastes to taste, new flavors to savor.

I check stacks of cookbooks out of the library on a weekly basis. I test out recipes from other regions with a new country of focus every month, just to make sure I'm always getting something new. Sometimes, I even find myself in the kitchen on a Wednesday night with no idea what to make for dinner, when suddenly, a recipe hits me, something based off something I had in a restaurant or perhaps just off what's in the cupboards, and I create something unique and completely my own.

That happened a few nights ago, in fact. I remembered the muesli pancakes on special at FirstWatch a few weeks back and ended up with Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal Raisin Pancakes.

A packet of apple cinnamon instant oatmeal

1/3 c. crushed nuts (I used a mix of peanuts and pecans)

I mixed up the pancake batter according to package instructions. Then I dumped in the nuts and raisins. Granted, I did not dump in specific amounts, but I'd say it was about 1/3 a cup of each. Then, I made them as I would make any other pancake on a skillet sprayed with oil, flipping when the edges started to harden.

When they were done, I dressed them up on a plate with powdered sugar and maple syrup and I gobbled up their fluffy, cinnamony, fruit-and-nutty sweetness with its sometimes crunchy and chewy texture. It was a smorgasbord of yum, and I had invented it. Still, I think if I wasn't in the food blogger mindset, I never would have come up with something like that. I never would have experienced that joy, the mouthfuls of whole grain combined with apple and raisin and pecan and bits of oat, the cinnamon and syrup combining to create its own tang.

It's those moments that keep me each week uploading pictures of dinners past and spending an hour I might have been revising my novel writing to strangers about my plans for that recently purchased bushel of butternut. As a food blogger, the world is my oyster, and I get to crack it open with each dish and taste what it has to offer. One day, I just might even slip one of those slippery critters down my gullet, and even if I end up hating oysters, I'll love the memory of having the guts to try them. More than that, I'll love writing the experience down and hitting publish.