My Turn

When I was younger, I was never one of those kids who would just endlessly ask "why" (I think my brother did enough of that for both of us). Sure I had my own ways of prolonging conversations (i.e. trying to get the answer I wanted), but rarely did I just say "why... okay, but why... great and why?"

I know better... never say never.

For your sake (and frankly, my own, too), I've been doing some thinking about why I have this blog (not to mention, why I spend a decent amount of time thinking about it). Even though I had the best intentions, my jump into this little venture was quite haphazard. I was inspired by a good friend's fun blog and since I'd been tinkering around more in the kitchen and with a camera, I thought I might try my own. Not much more thought was put into it.

I should have known that one day I'd be back here, examining the goals I have for this site - after all, the better part of my day job is spent helping our employees set, meet and even exceed their own goals so it's high time that I take some of my own medicine.

So... Kara's Kitchen? Why do I sit at this computer posting pictures and crafting my stories, especially since I talk about decidedly more than just food (and the mediocre pictures I take of it).

I've come up with a very non-exhaustive list to explain my existence here (and it's good for about 5 minutes, until I change my mind):

• First one is easy - a hour and a half flight separates my parents (Hi, Mom!) and us, so this is one way I can keep them posted on what we're doing; other sadly far-away friends fall in this category, too
• To share cooking successes (and learn from failures) although I certainly don't consider myself a real-live food blogger - my pictures aren't good enough and the recipes usually aren't my own, though I'm working on this
• To discuss collegiate (and other) sports, the ACC in particular; it should be said that this highly biased, unprofessional sports-writer happens to believe that the only team worth mentioning is Wake Forest (and Navy, the Nationals, and Redskins)
  
• To talk about entertaining and cooking within a tight food allowance; some occasional budgeting tips and coupon mentions (plus, I can't help it - the frugal part of me just leaps out sometimes)
  
• To keep a list of various things about DC... fun restaurants that we've tried and some of the different events going on in this great city that we are fortunate to call home
  

At the end of the day (or just this post), it turns out that Kara's Kitchen is merely one big record of some (often not) interesting parts of our lives and that lo-and-behold, I'm here just to write and kind of like it! Whatever you do, don't tell my elementary and middle school teachers - back in the day, I wasn't tops in my creative writing endeavors... for a while after a teacher suggested we vary our writing by starting or ending our assignments with a question, I ended everything I wrote with "how about you?"

Thus, and you already know this if you've made it this far, I usually sit down with some topic in mind, sometimes distantly-related to a recipe recently tested, and proceed to ramble.

This time, I wasn't able to come up with even the most remote relation to this delicious, healthy, crunchy, made-from-pantry-staples Coconut-Almond Granola, but you deserve, at the very least, to know where to find the recipe. It's so good that only a good cause such as Baking GALS could keep Chris and I from having an all-out brawl over it; the granola was quickly mailed off with the Celebration cookie bars.

How about you!? Am I the only one who does this blog-soul-searching? Yeah, I thought so.