Hello (food) world!

Hi! My name is Lauren. I live in central Virginia with my husband, daughter, and elderly cat. By day, I work as a product manager for a tech company, but by night (and mornings and weekends), you'll more often than not find me in the kitchen.

I decided to start this blog as a kind of food diary, to track what I've been making on a week to week basis. I'm the type of person who gets onto kicks - for example, in 8th grade, I ate nachos everyday for an entire summer (my signature recipe: Tostitos chips + grated cheddar cheese microwaved until melted, topped with Tostitos salsa. Classy.) I've matured a little bit since then. In adulthood, my pattern is more along the lines of making the same 5 or 6 meals on repeat for a few months then abandoning them forever.

There's nothing wrong with the occasional rut. I've been making sourdough bread several times a week for the last 6 months while I've been on maternity leave, and the repetition has definitely leveled up my bread baking skills. But the consequence of overdoing a good thing is boredom, which leads to angst over what to make, not unlike looking in your closet and feeling like you have nothing to wear. As you may have figured out from the title of this blog, I'm dubbing this angst "the dinner conundrum." (Yes, yes,I know dinner dilemma has better alliteration, but the domain was taken, and this is a hobby project, so I'm being cheap.).

By keeping this record of what I've made, I'm hoping to be able to more easily revisit things that I've loved and develop a longer, more varied roster of go-to dishes. Also, to have a halfway decent answer when someone asks me what I've made recently. Up until now, I've had notes scattered throughout several dozen cookbooks and my iPhone Notes app, which makes recalling things I've made in the past challenging. Put on the spot, the best I come up with is usually what I made last night.

A third, perhaps more personal, reason for creating this blog is to better understand what cooking actually means to me. Loosely paraphrasing Haruki Murakami in What I talk about when I talk about running, I can't actually define why I love the act of cooking unless I make the effort to put it into words. As one of the few interests that stuck with me since I was a kid, that I continually turn to day after day, even - or maybe especially - in busy or stressful times, it feels like an area worthy of introspection, even if what I come up with is nothing earth-shattering.

So, that's the why. Here's the what:

• What I've made this week and where I got the recipe or the inspiration.

• Mostly focused on casual meals I've made for my family. While I do occasionally entertain, I get the most satisfaction out of putting something good on the table on a regular weekday.

• Both meat-centric and vegetarian, "healthy" meals as well as indulgent desserts - I believe in everything in balance, with emphasis on whole, unprocessed ingredients.