Allow Me To Introduce Myself

Hellooooo! (Said in my Seinfeld/Kramer voice.)

Welcome to Vorace, a blog about my love of food & entertaining. In Italian, "vorace" means "ravenous." My boyfriend actually came up with the name as kind of a commentary on my insatiable appetite and the way I tend to, um, behave when I'm hungry. To me it represents my desperate love of food, and now I'm ready to share that with the world. I chose to use the Italian word for ravenous because I think it's a beautiful word in a lovely language. I'm obsessed with everything Italian, so what better language to use to name my very own blog?

Just to tell you a few things about myself - my name is Rachel, I'm 29 years old, and live in northern Virginia. The most important thing you need to know about me though is that I love food. I love eating it, cooking it, thinking about it. I enjoy entertaining with it and it's one of the ways I show love to people I care about. I'm not a chef by any means, I haven't been to culinary school, but I've developed such a love for food through learning about it informally and from, well, eating throughout my life.

My journey to this blog has been fun & interesting. I've been cooking since I was young, watching and assisting my mom in the kitchen while she was making anything from her own spaghetti sauce recipe to roast beef with root vegetables to whipping up her own version of chicken cacciatore. I became addicted to Food Network in college (Rachael Ray, Sarah Moulton, & Emeril Lagasse were my favs!), and that took my love of learning about food and cooking to a whole new level. I couldn't wait to get in the kitchen and test out what I had learned on 30 Minute Meals, to yell "Bam!," and I soon realized there really is nothing more stress-relieving than mincing a few cloves of garlic with a good, sharp knife.

I've broadened my horizons & palate a lot in the last five years or so, and I feel like that has opened up a whole new love and appreciation for food, eating, and entertaining. While I am a vegetarian (well, more of a lacto-ovo pescetarian if you want to get technical), I don't feel like that limits me very much. I do cook meat for my boyfriend, friends, and family on a regular basis, so I will definitely be including some of those recipes in my future posts. I've also been known to cook vegan dishes for friends, as well as low sodium for my dad. I'll be exploring those kinds of recipes as well. I'm kind of all over the board because I know there is more than one way to enjoy food and I want to consider everyone's ideas and diets. Plus, it's a fun challenge to create a tasty dish for a different diet.

I hope this blog can be a way to share my love & interest in all of these things with everyone. I'm also hopeful that it will be a fresh & fulfilling way to express & share my love of all things related to food, as well as be a means to keep discovering new things to create & cook, new restaurants & cuisines to try, and new ways to relate to friends & family. I want to post my own recipes, as well as recipes I have come across in cookbooks, on TV, and online that I want to try my hand at cooking myself; restaurant reviews and recipes I've recreated at home after tasting something in a restaurant that I enjoyed; and food I've whipped up after being inspired by places I've traveled or visited. I'm sure I'll come up with more things to blog about as I go. I also plan to share different aspects of my life as they relate to food & cooking, such as my love of photography and my ideas for entertaining.

Thanks for visiting and I hope you keep coming back! My first recipe will be posted promptly and I can't wait to hear what everyone thinks.

Salute!

Rachel