Wendy Hammond

In this blog I will attempt to cook through all the recipes in Simply in Season, which is part of the Mennonite trilogy: Simply in Season, More With Less, and Extending the Table. All focus on simple ingredients, with SiS focusing on eating seasonally, with local produce.

I’ve been at this blog thing for about two months now, and I have discovered the joy of cooking. One nice thing about cooking through a specific cookbook is it helps provide direction. There are SO many great recipes and cookbooks out there, I was suffering from too many recipes paralysis. Now, it’s easy enough to see what vegetables I need to use up from my CSA and find recipes in SiS that use them. I love that most of the other ingredients are very basic and things I have on hand. I also like that the recipes encourage mix and matching, so that as I get more comfortable cooking I can add my own creativity to the recipe. I’ve also discovered that I don’t measure as much, using my own judgment instead of measuring out the herbs and spices. These are things that I had always wanted to learn, but couldn’t quite find any articles or cookbooks to help me do that. I guess it’s true what they say, experience really is the best teacher!

My husband loves that I’m cooking more, although he is a great cook himself, and often gives me lots of great ideas for improving the recipe once I’ve made it once or twice. I’m not going to lie, it DOES take effort to cook this much. But the blog has made it fun, and I’m learning tricks to make things go faster (like planning and shopping ahead, for example, or doing the prepwork for a few recipes at once).

I work full time at a job I love, doing public relations for an international relief and development organization. Sometimes it requires a bit more travel than I’d like but it is rewarding. I have a great husband who puts up with me.