Hi! I'm Debbie. Here at Categorically Well-Read I give an extra layer to the reading life. Learn more about me, check out my current category of books, submit your own suggestion, or check out my latest post.

As the New Year of 2018 approached, I picked up an old used book, "A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy" and I thought wouldn't it be fun to read a book for each season. I promptly went out and found books for spring, summer, and autumn, a particular talent of mine is finding and buying books.

That thought became a habit and I found myself doing category arcs of books with titles themed around birds, body parts, weather conditions...and by that time I was hooked on reading this way...and the seeds for this website were sown.

This website will undoubtably evolve and grow as I find my way about...figure out what and how I want to write and share. I credit my fledgling meditation practice for this spurt of creativity, the practice seems to have opened up a neural pathway in my brain that is allowing me to finally begin writing. 

Gourmappetit is a recipe project I started back in the late 1990's based on the massive collection of recipes that I clipped primarily from the magazines-Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines while I was waiting for my washing machine to fill.  

Many life times ago, in the late ’80’s, I went to cooking school and worked briefly as a professional chef, then I became pregnant, my son while healthy had some birth complications, so I became a stay-at-home mom.

I still loved cooking and wanted to keep my head in the game so I got subscriptions to Bon Appetit and Gourmet, two of the most popular cooking magazines at the time.  By the mid ’90’s I had stacks of these mostly unread magazines, my life had moved on at that point.  I decided to cancel both subscriptions and as we needed the shelf space upstairs, all the magazines got shifted down to the laundry room in the basement.

At that time I was using my husband’s grandmother’s May Tag washing machine, and to get it work efficiently you needed to add the detergent and then let the machine fill water and agitate a bit before adding the clothes. My son’s favorite thing was to use the “stick” to push the dirty laundry down into the water. That washer was a force of nature, an ancient machine that we eventually replaced, although the machine itself never quit—a testament to the way May Tag built their products way back when.

While waiting for the washer to fill, I started going through the stacks of magazines and tearing out the pages that contained interesting recipes. Eventually, I made it through all the magazines, of course, I was then I was left with a giant stack of clippings.

At some point, I trimmed most of the lot down and stuck the saved recipes into old fashioned sticky photo albums, the pages I never got around to trimming down are in a expanding folder and the recipes I wanted to try “first” are in a flowered box. It was one of those projects that I dabbled in for years, but it I mostly ignored it’s existence.

About 10 years ago, my life evolved again, I found myself alone moving to a new location and opening my own business, a small yoga studio, named The Yoga Whole. I teach yoga, prenatal yoga, childbirth education, and serve as a Birth Doula.  It is a life that suits me very well.

Surprisingly enough this old project moved with me and for the most part has remained, as always, hidden away in the basement. In the fall of 2018 I found myself cracking open the flowered box and working through some of the recipes, as I wanted to refresh my cooking skills.

Being on your own and cooking just for yourself can make a person rather lazy in the kitchen. It turns out that I am not much of a recipe person, what I normally fix I can make without needing a recipe.

I found myself making notes and writing about the ’90’s recipes I was pulling out my box, both good and the not so good. Some I have had to just label “what was I thinking”??

Since the vast majority of these recipes came from Bon Appetit and the long defunct Gourmet magazines I decided to cobble the names together as Gourmappetit and post my results.  The result is vaguely similar to what Julie did in the book she wrote about cooking her way through a cookbook by the legendary Julia Child.

Think of Gourmappetit as a “side dish”, something that adds a little savory umami to Categorically Well Read.

Hi! I'm Debbie. Here at Categorically Well-Read I give an extra layer to the reading life. Learn more about me, check out my current category of books, submit your own suggestion, or check out my latest post.