Hello World!

Hello! After months of debating, we've decided to bite the bullet and start our food blog! Our kitchen experiments, cocktail alchemy, grilling endeavors, etc got to the point where we wanted to have a place to document our experiments - a lab notebook, if you will. So this is mostly a reference for us, but we decided to publish this too, especially for our friends who always ask for the recipes. :)

About us:

We're a married couple and both science Ph.D.s - a synthetic chemist turned computational chemist, and a biochemist turned computational chemist. And yes, we met in the lab. (Insert joke about physical chemistry here!) In the kitchen is where we get out all that pent-up chemistry experimentalism that isn't satisfied by sitting in front of the computer all day. Plus, let's face it, we all have to eat. Both of us are California transplants - one of us from Austria, one of us from the East Coast - but it's rubbed off on both of us, and we are big into organic this and carbon footprint that. (We don't have a car - I like to tell people that we believe in a small carbon footprint and public transportation, which is most of it, but part of it is sheer convenience, aka laziness.) We've got a pretty awesome organic vegetable garden - which is 95% Christian's doing to date. Like many things, Veena was like "Hey, it would be awesome if..." but Christian's actually the one who managed to execute this in a pretty spectacular fashion. :) We also belong to a CSA - keeping up with a weekly CSA vegetable delivery has changed our diet pretty dramatically! We've been really happy with Farm Fresh To You (yes, we accept referral credits :)

Due to health issues (I'm lucky enough to have both reactive hypoglycemia *and* lupus - no matter what House says, sometimes it actually is lupus...) - good nutrition is very important to both of us. We're not vegetarians (I just can't fathom giving up lamb and sushi, Christian can't fathom giving up... well, meat) but we eat tons and tons of vegetables. Pretty much everything we've ever read speaks to the importance of vegetables for good health - and videos on autoimmune disease like Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead and Dr. Terry Wahls' TED talk on her struggle with multiple sclerosis, along with countless other sources, have really been an inspiration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjgBLwH3Wc (It's long but very worth it, and the end is even more spectacular than the beginning) I think there are amazing health benefits to be gained by getting back to nutritional basics, at least within reason. I aim for at least ~80% adherence to healthy eating, and don't extremely about the remainder, in order to keep myself happy and sane (life is hard enough as it is!)  In general though, I am pretty strict about my low-carb diet. I tend to get sick (reactive hypoglycemia) if I exceed ~25 gm of carbs at one serving, so we tend to eat quinoa and other low glycemic index carbohydrates, and I've been eating mostly sugar-free for six years now. (Good thing I don't have much of a sweet tooth - but if I really want to try something, I try it. Especially if we've made it. Trying is usually different than eating, if that makes sense.) Christian being Austrian though misses his potatoes/pasta/etc, and we currently have a backlog of CSA potatoes, so we've definitely been experimenting. I'm passionate about health - not only do I work on biomedical research for a living, but many of my hobbies revolve around reading/thinking/working on various aspects of it as well.

A couple who's fanatical about personal privacy starting a public blog together - this should be interesting, let's see if it actually works! Welcome to our journey! :)

PS - Background photo by Christian - water drops on his garden kale. :)