Starting the year off right!

Well, it's finally happened.

The blog that was talked about for an entire year, has finally become a reality.

The idea of a food blog first came to me about 4 years ago, after settling into our new condo in Chicago. There were still a couple boxes that had yet to be unpacked, and one in particular caught my eye. Scribbled across the side in black Sharpie marker were the words "Cooking Magazines". It was like the unpacking gods had come out of nowhere and given me an excuse to flip through some light reading material! Gary (my now-fiance) couldn't say one thing about it either - I was going through them and throwing away the ones that I no longer wanted. Little did he know, that meant leafing through, page by page, and tearing out any recipe that I thought had a chance of making it onto the dinner table in the near future (read: next 10 years). Two days later, I finally  made it through the last of the magazines, and was now left with a rather large pile of loose-leaf pages waiting to find a home. And so began my new hobby: Cookbook Scrapbooking - cutting and pasting pictures and recipes from various magazines, and hand writing my own recipes to create a nice, neat presentation. That was my version of a blog back then. Unfortunately, that hard copy gets shared with very few people, given the fact that it primarily sits in my cupboard when not in  use. Now, the time has come to finally to reveal some of its content in the new and improved digital version.

So what took so long and why now? To tell you the truth, it really boiled down to finding the right name. The perfect name. One that would stand out. One that would not necessarily have a real meaning to it, but that would semi-fit the food theme. I began by jotting down two columns of words: one containing a noun related to cooking/food, the other containing a series of descriptive words to compliment it. You see, that is where I went wrong. What I was doing was entirely way to complicated and left me with 3,498,265 possible combinations. Who in the world could possibly have narrowed THAT down? Then, I began thinking outside the box. Amazing what a little creativity can do, right? And here we are. The Spotted Fig. Does it make sense? No. But who said that it really had to?

To enjoying new recipes, one day at a time.

xoxo

j.