Intro and Explanation

I’m a flexitarian. I didn’t learn that word until recently, but I feel it describes me. I have had a lot of vegetarian and vegan friends, but I don’t feel I could ever be either. And I definitely couldn’t be a raw foodist!
I like to mix my raw food, vegan and vegetarian food with some good local meat and call it a meal. I refuse to eat meat or milk from animals that have lived inhumanely with hormones injected into them. I like my meat to come from those happy little local farms we all picture in our minds- except I really do get meat from those farmers directly, and I’ve had to learn how to re-make recipes using meat on the bone rather than the perfectly de-skinned and de-boned meat you get at the store. The meat I buy might be more expensive, but it becomes affordable when you don’t put it in every meal.
This blog isn’t all about meat, though. Or even about all the vegetarian meals we create. It’s about cooking experiences, eating experiences, and drinking experiences. (Not drunken experiences, that would be a whole ‘nother blog…. these drinking experiences would be from drinking our homemade beer, wine, mead, kahlua, and other crazy concoctions).
I’m going to start this blog by working my way through a book my husband got me for the holidays: “All Cakes Considered” by Melissa Gray. I felt like I knew how to make cakes, but when glancing through this book (which you are supposed to tackle from beginning to end, one cake at a time, rather than skipping around like you would in a normal cookbook) I realized I had only really made one cake, many many times: My husband’s favorite carrot cake.
Almost ten years ago, I started experimenting with substituting unsweetened applesauce for butter and oil in cakes, and that carrot cake recipe was one of my success stories. I held a taste-test contest at my husband’s college graduation party in 2004, where I had one applesauce cake and one oil cake (the recipe called for 1 ½ CUPS OF OIL!) I had the guests try a little from each cake and tell me which one was better- and the result was overwhelmingly the applesauce cake! They were happy to find out that the better tasting cake was also much, much healthier. But it isn’t a health food- it still contains a shitload of sugar.
So here comes my on-going attempts to make a whole bunch of cake.