I love to cook, but cooking as a hobby is a more recent development. Years ago, as a mother of young children, I didn’t cook for my family as much as I simply threw something together. I balanced their preferences with inexpensive economical food to feed a family of five. Meals also needed to be quick and easy to suit our sometimes hectic schedules. Preparing elaborate meals was a luxury reserved for weekends and holidays.
As my children went off to college, my husband and I settled in and with more time, one of our favorite pastimes became scrolling through recipes on social media, picking out ones that looked good, shopping for ingredients and then spending a Saturday or Sunday cooking the recipe. We have found some gems that way that are still in our arsenal to this day and we often pull them out and cook them together. And when I say cook together, I mean I do all of the fun things and he acts as the onion and vegetable chopper, the person who fries any meat that splatters and often he’s the one that keeps the prep area tidy. But he does get to eat the finished product and that really is his favorite part.
Food is universal and has the power to bring people together. Cooking food has become a popular hobby and a way for people to express and show love to their family and friends. So, when our board chair, TD Welch, got a few requests for a weekend recipe column of some sort, and because I personally love to cook and try new dishes, I was drawn to the idea. But the thought of finding someone who would take on such a project wasn’t going to be easy. Or so I thought.
It happened quite by accident when we were meeting with the president of Team WTI, Kim Gehling, a few weeks back. Team WTI in Geneseo designed our website and still performs web maintenance for us. We met with Kim to discuss not only changes we would like to make to the site, but also about forming a partnership between WTI and the Voice. During the discussion, TD mentioned that we were hoping to start a recipe column. Kim, who I have come to rely upon and who I am forever grateful to for helping get the Voice up and running, smiled. I mean a really big smile.
You like to cook? I asked her. She did, and not only did she love to cook but she confessed to recording recipe videos for TikTok. As a business owner with a creative side, she found that she needed something fun and creative to do on the side and cooking, she said, was her passion.
Immediately, I was intrigued. We explained to her our idea- for our readers to submit their recipes, tell us the recipe’s backstory or history, and then have someone prepare them and write a column on them. She loved the idea and was instantly on board. She came to our office that day to discuss changes to the website, but she left as a columnist. Just like that.
Kim has already started sending columns with her own delicious recipes and photos and the story to go along with them. Her column, “In the kitchen with Kim,” will be featured each Saturday. While she waits for readers to send their recipes for her to sample, she will share some of her own, and just to make it interesting, she also plans to prepare some viral, trending recipes that she finds on the internet and give us her impression of them.
It should be fun and I hope our readers will join in and send her their best recipes along with the history surrounding them. You can begin emailing your recipes immediately to kewaneevoicerecipes@gmail.com. When the recipes start coming in, she will try to get to as many as she can. Make sure you include your name and your hometown, the name of the dish and its backstory so she can include that information in the column.
I hope you all will enjoy the new column and cook and bake along with us. Look for her first column tomorrow.
