About Me

Living, cooking, and gardening in the Texas Hill Country with the husband and the puppy. We love taking advantage of the great restaurants in and around Austin, and the great food shopping experiences. Farmers' markets and specialty food shops abound! By no means are we professional chef types - cooking and eating and loving food is an intense hobby for us. We're closer to the 30 side of twenty-somethings, fairly settled in our lives, and constantly pursuing the new favorite recipe/technique/ingredient while continuing to enjoy a solid list of regulars.

Requests? Questions? Want to know more? Email me: comfort.foodie.starr at gmail dot com.


Why a blog?
After spending much time online reading other people's cooking blogs in search of new and interesting recipes, I realized that I (or I should say we) cook quite a bit. Enough, in fact, to be able to blog about it in much of the similar manner of all of the cooking blogs I follow. I'd also like to include photographs of the process and of the final product, as I have my new camera that needs some love. My husband has said several times that good food photography is very difficult, and I am intent on proving him wrong.

Comfort Foodie. A blog about the love of good food, quality ingredients, the process of recipe crafting. There is very little more exciting to me than reading a new recipe - the anticipation builds as I scan the ingredient list, my mouth waters as I contemplate the particular flavors and how they might combine with each other, and by the time I get through the steps of the recipe I'm already bouncing in my seat, making grocery lists and checking the cupboards for ingredients. The excitement grows at the store, the search for that one last ingredient and the slight anxiety, the flutter in the tummy, if I can't find it (what can I use instead? is it that important?), and then the satisfaction of discovering it and carefully placing it in my cart, as if I might lose it if I just tossed it in. Once home, I don't want to waste time unpacking all of the groceries, eager to get started on my newest recipe. The assembly, watching a meal come together from scattered ingredients, is remarkable. And tasting. Of course tasting, learning how the different ingredients affect the flavors and textures throughout the cooking process. The final assembly, the combination of different parts of the recipe into one whole, the point when I can finally step back and proudly admire my hard work for a minute before sitting down and enjoying the final product. Sometimes I don't know which I like more, the cooking or the eating.



In addition to recipes and photography, there will probably be some musings on our vegetable garden. It will be the second year we've attempted such a thing, and we learned a lot the first year. It's a challenge to keep plants protected from the late frosts only to battle with keeping them cool enough to produce in the scorching summers.

We cook a lot. And we cook a variety of foods. There will be our favorites, our go-tos on nights when we don't really know what to do or don't have anything planned, and there will be our adventures, new recipes or new ingredients that may or may not work out.

 I find peace in the kitchen. I am most comfortable there, with or without a recipe, and I derive great satisfaction and contentment from my efforts. On that note, I present to you Comfort Foodie, taking the love of food from the recipe to the tummy.