Sorry for the sabbatical!

I realize I've been extremely remiss in my blogging. I've been sort of up to my ears in wedding stuff for part of the time (more on that in a future post) and the other part I spent just being tired from all the stuff going on in this thing called life. Sidenote: living in Ukraine- where traveling just takes so much more time- got me accustomed to a little less hustle and bustle. I was busy and doing things in Ukraine, but the fact that I had to wait on things like buses and trains or had to take the time to walk places seemed to cut down on the ability to commit to too much activity.

Anyway, today is a confession post: I have discovered that I'm a little bit of a snob. Why is that, you may ask? Well, this week, I had a student in my office, chatting about Thanksgiving. She was telling me that she was asked to make the "homemade, from scratch" pies for her holiday gathering. She then followed that with this statement, "I told them that if they'd get the Pillsbury dough and the pie filling, I'd be happy to!"

I mentally scoffed at Pillsbury dough and pie filling constituting "homemade, from scratch." Seriously? I didn't do just a ton of baking before Ukraine, but when I did get thrown in the deep end (that would be the cooking and baking processes of Ukraine), I had to figure out how to make things from actual scratch (sidenote: my mother did try to teach me these things as I grew up, but I didn't take the time to learn). I spent a lot of time pulling up recipes on the internet and gathering them from my mom to learn how to make my own Bisquick, pie crusts, pie filling, pumpkin puree, and a myriad of other things. That whole making-things-from-scratch business is exceedingly time consuming (and complicated when you're learning to read packaging in Russian- or worse, having to learn to ask for those things in the market!) and deserves a great deal of applause, in my opinion.

So, for all my ex-pat friends and non-ex-pat friends who take the time and effort to bake from ACTUAL scratch, I applaud you.