“I melt with a mixture of relief to have escaped the clutches of that blackmailing coyote and anticipation of that long baguette. Maybe food porn isn’t such a bad thing after all.”

Do I have your attention now?

It’s Hump day/Food Porn “50 Shades of Chicken” day. Tonight I am making the “Chicken Sub”. Seems innocuos enough, right? Well it is actually pretty straight forward: marinate chicken cutlets (I’m using butterflied chicken thighs), then make a modified caprese salad on a fabulous baguette (or pan de agua in our Puerto Rican case). But to read the description in not only the intro but also in the actual directions, you may in fact blush. For example: : When the chicken can no longer stand the antici[ation, heat the remaining 3 tbls. …” or “…marinate at room temperature…or even better, overnight until it begs of you.”. Yea– this is a cookbook.

And if you really think about – or at least this is how I think- cooking should be fun, adventurous, gasp- even arousing! Or at least that’s what I think about cooking. Ok– maybe not the arousing part but some Julia dishes were oh so good. I don’t know– it always baffled me hearing how people would say that cooking is “hard”, or “complicated” or that everything they tried tasted “awful”. I didn’t grow up with a savvy chef of a mom: eggs mixed with canned tuna fish was absolutely yummy when I was young (and even now) and Hamburger helper was a staple in our cupboard. But over the course of my formative years, I was lucky enough to work at the Ritz-Carlton and Old Warson Country Club, which exemplified top-notch cooking; and I got spoiled.

So I made food a priority. I Enjoy food. I RELISH food. I sometimes can’t wait to try out that new dish or head to a new restaurant to try out FOOD. For me, it’s relaxing. The repetitive cutting and chopping was comforting to me. I looked forward to dinner time so I could, without question, spend hours in the kitchen. To get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday? No. I just fell in love with cooking.

So trying to pick that back up here in Puerto Rico has been quite trying.Reading a recipe, making a list, and expecting to find said ingredients at the store is a given; stateside. Here on the island– you’re lucky to find half of your ingredients. I’m not complaining. I’m just not used to this shortcoming. But this is giving me all sorts of challenges to overcome. This is when cooking gets fun!

So tonight was a chicken sandwich. Yum. Tomorrow it’s a Giada pasta dish with some special puerto rican sausage. It’s all about adapting, right? UPDATE: will be doing Ellie Krieger’s…with a little modification.

Nothing will ever go as it is planned. I learned that the day we decided to move to PR; the day we took our lil 5 week old baby Gabriela on a 10 hour travel plan and moving into a new house. You gotta go with the flow. And in cooking and in life, I think things will turn out pretty good!

Here’s to a happy HUMP day!